Perfect host
by ozaer.sahibzadah.7
Summary: When Orochimaru left Akatsuki, he took samples from each of his fellow members. He then kidnaps the one he will make his new vessel… Naruto Uzumaki. Strong Naruto
1. Chapter 1

"Normal talk."

'Normal thoughts.'

"Bijuu/Summon talk."

'Bijuu/Summon thoughts.'

'_Mental talking.'_

Prologue

There was a throat-clearing noise behind him. Naruto jumped and twisted around in the seat, nearly slipping backwards off of the swing. In the large, dappled shade that the tree above was casting stood Mizuki-sensei, and he had a proposition for Naruto. The ten-year-old boy didn't quite understand what Mizuki meant by these 'tests' he was being considered for, but he did understand that Mizuki was offering him specialized, one-on-one training with a group located outside of Konoha such as the type that would make him a powerful shinobi in no time.

"Are you willing to try it, Naruto?" Mizuki asked, a smile twisting his cruel mouth. Naruto nodded vehemently. "Then come with me at once so I can prepare you for your journey. Don't worry about Hokage-sama," Mizuki said as Naruto opened his mouth to comment on the abruptness of the decision, "I will inform him of where you have gone. Who knows, when you come back in a few years, you may find that Hokage-sama recognizes you to be strong enough to make chunin. After these tests, there will be no question whatsoever that you are ready to make genin at the very least." Well, what could Naruto do? Mizuki had said the magic words.

Naruto hopped down from the swing and followed Mizuki some distance, soon leaving the familiar, looming shape of the shinobi academy behind and travelling through the heart of the market district. Before too long they were out in the outskirts of the village, where broken glass and stray papers littered the ground and the buildings were of the narrow, crowded, choked-looking brick variety that Naruto found rather displeasing, as it reminded him a bit of the district where his own apartment was located, all grimy windows and broken streetlights. Naruto vaguely wondered why they had had to walk so far, but his queries were mostly eclipsed by the unexpected turn his life had just made, and sheer excitement kept bursting through his creeping doubts.

Mizuki had turned down a broad, deserted side street and Naruto stepped up behind him, rounding the corner to find that Mizuki had turned to face the mouth of the side street and with it, Naruto, who wasted no time approaching his sensei. Mizuki crouched down, placing his eye level slightly below Naruto's though he avoided looking the blonde-haired boy in the eye, one hand taking hold of Naruto's forearm and the other fumbling for something in his pocket, still smiling, always smiling, so coldly, so insincerely. "Now hold still, Naruto," Mizuki said, pulling back Naruto's sleeve and, before the boy could protest, expertly injecting him with a thin, clear liquid.

Naruto stared in horror, horror at Mizuki and at himself. All his life, he had constantly been taught and retaught not to trust anyone. He should have listened to his doubts! And now he was going to die of some terrible poison at the hands of his sensei! Naruto swayed, eyes unfocused, and collapsed. Mizuki scooped up the unconscious boy and stood waiting until he saw a shadow flicker down at the end of the street. He strode over to meet the robed, bespectacled figure.

"Well done, Mizuki. Orochimaru-sama will be most pleased with your work."

"Thank you, Kabuto-san," Mizuki said, handing the sleeping child over. "What are my new orders?"

"Remain here, undercover, until you next receive instruction," Kabuto said, adjusting Naruto's limp form on his shoulder and concealing him in a fold of his cloak. He gave Mizuki a brief nod and left, taking Naruto with him.

**Orochimaru**'**s ****base **

Naruto awoke slowly, groggy and confused. The bed he was lying on was too hard and the light shining in his face too bright. Naruto sat up and slid off of the high table, blinking the dazzle out of his smarting eyes and looking around him. Young though he was, Naruto could recognize a hospital room when he saw one, and this room, with its harsh lighting, operating table, and scrubbed tiling seemed like a bizarre mixture of hospital and autopsy lab, both of which Naruto had previously had the displeasure to experience in his short life within the confines of the walls of Konoha.

There was a large sheet of dark mirror set into one wall, no doubt a one-way window for observing what was happening in _this_ room from the safety and relative comfort of an adjoining room, like the ones they used in the Torture and Interrogation department. Naruto went over to that mirror and tapped on it, reasoning that he wouldn't be in a room with a one-way mirror if no one were watching him. "Hello?" he called tentatively.

In the next room, Orochimaru watched as his new host sat up and looked around. "Take a look, Kabuto. This is the start of your newest fulltime project." He clapped Kabuto on the shoulder. "Congratulations." Kabuto noticed that the Snake sannin seemed in unusually good spirits.

Kabuto dubiously watched the blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy as he looked around the Spartan room. "From what I've been told, the boy is practically illiterate," he said.

"Well, if your plan of depending on the Kyuubi to keep young Naruto alive comes to nothing, it won't matter. Why don't you go and prepare him for his first infusion?"

Kabuto was startled. "So soon, Orochimaru-sama?"

Orochimaru shrugged, smiling playfully as he watched Naruto approach the tinted one-way-mirror. "If he doesn't survive the first operation, there's no need to train him," Orochimaru pointed out. "If he does survive it, _then_ you may begin to bring him up to speed. Teach him to read first, I think. That will make your job easier in the future."

Kabuto strode to the exit of the room but did not open the door yet. His hand resting on the doorknob, he turned back to look at Orochimaru. "The boy will undoubtedly have questions. What do I tell him?"

"Anything you want. Just do not tell him my eventual plans for him or what exactly the experiments we will be performing on him consist of." Kabuto nodded and turned to the door, but stopped as Orochimaru spoke one last time. "Oh, and Kabuto, don't tell him about the Kyuubi. We'll have to let him know eventually, but all in good time."

"Of course, Orochimaru-sama." Kabuto left, shutting the door behind him with a quiet, respectful click. Orochimaru shifted his gaze back to the window, a smile manifesting on his pale face when Naruto jumped as the door to the operation room was unlocked and pushed open.

Naruto started around as there was the loud click of a lock turning over, and the door was pushed inwards. A boy entered. He was tall and looked to be around fifteen, old, from Naruto's perspective, but nowhere near as old as Jiji. He wore his mid-length silver hair tied back and round glasses perched on his nose. When he spotted Naruto standing by the mirror, he smiled. Naruto wasn't entirely sure he liked that smile. "Who are you?" Naruto asked accusatorially. "Where am I? What happened to Mizuki?"

"I am Kabuto Yakushi, and this one of the labs of my master. Mizuki works for the same man as I do and remained in Konoha while we brought you here."

"Why did you take me here?" Naruto asked, backing up as Kabuto tried to approach him.

"You agreed to perform a couple of tests for us in exchange for us training you to be a great shinobi," Kabuto explained.

"What kind of tests?" Naruto asked suspiciously. However, at the mention of the tests that Mizuki had spoken of, he took a step forward in spite of himself. Encouraged, Kabuto leaned against the edge of the operating table on which Naruto had awoken and patted the surface, inviting Naruto to sit up on it. Naruto did so, perching himself on the edge as far away from Kabuto as he could get.

"These tests are nothing special, maybe a few new vitamin supplements every couple of months," Kabuto said casually. "Probably nothing immediately noticeable will happen, but it can't hurt."

"Why me?" Naruto asked.

Kabuto was growing weary of the incessant questions, but he kept the smile grafted onto his smooth, pale face so as not to alert the boy. "We are interested in you. You have incredible chakra reserves and your healing rate gives you great potential as a shinobi. We only recently discovered you through Mizuki and we want to see you trained right."

For the first time, Naruto stopped focusing entirely on being wary and began expending a bit of his mind to taking interest in what was happening to him. "What will you teach me?"

Kabuto waved a finger at Naruto. "Not yet; that would be telling. And you just got here! There are some preliminary tests we'd like to perform on you before I begin to teach you anything. Nothing of the pass-or-fail variety, I just want to know a bit more about your current skills and limitations before I begin." Kabuto pulled a vial out of his pocket and a small glass out of another. He quickly decanted the liquid from the vial into the glass and handed it to Naruto. "Please drink this."

Naruto sniffed the drink suspiciously, but was unable to detect any but a slight, oily, waxy, scent. It didn't smell like anything dangerous that Naruto had ever drunk before, so he downed it in one swallow. Kabuto quickly slid the glass out of Naruto's slack fingers and laid him face up on the operating table so he wouldn't topple off from his perch on the edge. He ignored the accusing look on Naruto's face as the boy once again fell unconscious.

The door opened and Orochimaru entered, stepping to Kabuto's side and looking down into Naruto's sleeping face. "Well done. Prepare the first infusion and we'll give it to him immediately."

Kabuto walked over to one of the counters along the wall and took out a key. Unlocking a wall-mounted cabinet, he swung open the door to reveal racks of samples and experimental infusions that did not require refrigeration. The more unstable solutions would not have been kept in the room where a valuable test subject was left to resurface from a drugged sleep. Kabuto reached up, gloved fingers hovering before the racks of vials. "Which one, Orochimaru-sama?"

Orochimaru hesitated for no more than a heartbeat. "Konan's DNA first, I think. He can't do much harm with it, and if his body can't handle turning from flesh to paper and back, you'll soon see and know if we ought to scrap this project and start over with someone new." Orochimaru gave Kabuto a meaningful look.

"Yes, Orochimaru-sama." Kabuto's fingers closed around a slim, glass vial and lifted it out of the rack, swinging the cabinet door to and locking it before returning to Orochimaru with the vial. Earlier he had, through methodical trial and error using normal paper, come upon a way to convert paper into a liquid form that it was possible to inoculate one with. Kabuto handed the vial to Orochimaru and, while Kabuto hooked Naruto up to various apparatuses that would monitor Naruto's heart rate, brain patterns, breathing rate, chakra levels, and the like, Orochimaru loaded the solution into a hypodermic needle. When Naruto was all set up- Kabuto had even gone so far as to strap him to the table- Orochimaru approached the boy, holding the needle.

He injected the infusion directly into the main ulnar artery in Naruto's right arm. No sooner than he had removed the needle, the chamber empty, the prick-mark closed up before single drop of blood could spill, healing without so much as a lingering scar. _That Youki is useful stuff,_ Orochimaru mused, stepping away from the table. _Too bad I shall probably have to extract the Kyuubi from the boy before I can claim possession of his skin._He disposed of the used needle and gave Kabuto strict instructions to watch Naruto, to keep him sedated until his vitals had returned to normal and, if he was still alive at that point, to then move him to the room that had been prepared for him. If and when he woke naturally in the new room, he was to be fed. At that point, Kabuto was to use his judgment about when to begin Naruto's lessons, though he was not to begin teaching Naruto to use the powers that his new DNA would hopefully grant him. Those lessons would begin only with Orochimaru's express orders.


	2. Chapter 1 part 2

Chapter 1

Kabuto sat by Naruto for most of the next few days, watching the various monitors and, every so often, injecting another dose of sedative, spacing the doses so that the Kyuubi never had enough time to burn off the last batch before the newest amount was injected. At first, Naruto's vitals had all but shut down, his breathing had slowed until the rise and fall of his chest was barely visible and his heart rate had slowed so much that Kabuto was constantly on tenterhooks as to whether the next tiny rise in the flat line on the monitor would ever come. His brain activity had become erratic as well, sometimes there would be hours of nothing but the normal, automatic commands and signals, telling the heart to pump and the lungs to breathe and the like, but not much else, save for an occasional dream spike. At other times, there would be endless minutes of feverish activity, flurries of spikes and blips in the monitors, though for the most part he was quiet.

After the first two or three days, however, Naruto became constantly restless; he would mumble long streams of nonsense syllables and his breath would come harder until he was gasping and panting and Kabuto could see his eyelids twitching in REM sleep. During those times, his brain activity was that of one who is alert, albeit of one who has been awake for far too long on nowhere near enough sleep and is being asked to perform strenuous mental calisthenics.

At long last, after nearly six days, Naruto settled down. From the monitors and Naruto's still form, from the steady rising and falling of his chest, Kabuto deduced that the storm had finally passed and it was time to wake up the subject. He unhooked all of the monitors, carefully shutting them off as he did so. He then picked up Naruto's limp form and carried him out of the room and into a nearby room that had specially prepared for him. Kabuto then retired, closing the door behind him quietly so as not wake up the blonde boy, who had passed smoothly from drug-induced unconsciousness to true sleep as seamlessly as one normally does from standing to sitting. Kabuto retreated the room adjacent to Naruto's, to which the former was connected via a one-way mirrored window so that Kabuto would see the moment when Naruto woke up, and perhaps get some rest until then.

Naruto awoke and sat up immediately. He felt very slightly achy all over, but the feeling soon dissipated and he forgot the unusual sensation entirely. He took a look around the room he was in. There was one door, which was, when Naruto tried it, locked. On the wall opposite the door was another blank expanse of tinted, mirrored glass. The low bunk that he had woken up in was pushed against the wall located to the right of the one with the mirror on it. All in all, the room was about the size of his old apartment back in Konoha, with a dirty, tiled floor.

"I know the drill," Naruto muttered to himself as he walked up to the tinted mirror. "Hey!" he said, pounding on the window, "Let me out! Everyone in here is dead!"

Naruto listened attentively, smiling in appreciation when he heard first one crash, muffled as it was by walls and distance, and then another as the door to the room burst open and Kabuto appeared kunai in hand, ready for trouble.

"What was that?" he asked tightly. Naruto could see that the older boy was a bit short on sleep and patience.

Naruto chuckled. He had once yelled the same thing as he just had when he had the misfortune to be locked in the boy's bathroom back in the academy. They had gotten him out quickly enough, but he had had to endure a lecture right after by one of his least favourite sensei's. "Do you have anything to eat?" he asked.

Kabuto stowed the kunai in a holster and stood, smoothing back his hair with one hand, collecting his thoughts. "Yes, of course," He said after a moment. He left the room, returning a minute later with a tray bearing a bowl of broth, a small loaf of bread, a couple of apples and a glass and pitcher of water. Naruto fell on the food, practically inhaling it before Kabuto's bemused eyes. "What now?" he asked, placing an apple core in the empty bowl.

"Now you sit down and tell me how you feel," Kabuto said seriously.

Naruto thought it was a strange request, after all, he didn't remember anything between when he fell asleep in that other room and awoke in this one, but answered impatiently, without sitting down, "I'm fine. Can we start training?"

Kabuto raised an eyebrow at Naruto's eagerness. "If you feel up to it, fine. Come with me." Naruto obediently followed as Kabuto led him out into the hallway and through the rambling passages until he stopped before a door, unremarkable in its similarity to all the others they had passed on the way. Kabuto unlocked the door and ushered Naruto through before quickly following and locking the door securely behind him. It seemed that Kabuto was an avid locker of things.

Naruto looked around at the shelves upon shelves rising up to the ceiling all around him, each one packed to overflowing with scrolls and books. "I don't get it. You're going to train me in a library?" Naruto had never had much use for libraries and was disappointed in Kabuto's choice of venue.

"In a manner of speaking. Sit down, Naruto," Kabuto said, sliding into a low chair situated beside the nearest table.

Reluctantly, Naruto joined him, sprawling in the seat and giving Kabuto his best sarcastic stare. Kabuto, pretending not to see, pulled forward a couple of books that had been neatly stacked on the corner of the table.

"What, you're going to teach me to read or something?" Naruto asked disgustedly.

"Yes. It's all part of the intensive training program you're on. You have to start at the beginning and learn the basics first, before we teach you the advanced jutsu. This isn't the academy, where they constantly push gifted students ahead before they have time to get a proper grounding in everything one is supposed to learn in the academy about being a shinobi," Kabuto said sternly.

"Don't waste your time," Naruto said scornfully, "I already know how to read."

"Oh yes?" Kabuto said, in a voice that was just not a snap, his patience wearing thin. "Read this for me." Kabuto slid a book, a medical textbook, out from the pile, thumbed through until he reached a page that had been marked with a narrow strip of paper, and pushed it across the table at Naruto.

Naruto stared down at the incomprehensible wording and language, at the footnotes and variables and Latin phrases. After a few minutes, he glanced up at Kabuto, who was watching him closely with an expression that showed that he didn't know whether to be smug or sympathetic.

"Well?" Kabuto prompted him. "Can you read it?"

"I did read it," Naruto said on a sudden flash of inspiration.

"What?"

"I read it in my head."

Naruto didn't even see Kabuto move, but the next moment, his right arm was being twisted up behind his back excruciatingly and he was leaning forward, his nose almost touching the table top to try and take some of the agonizing pressure off of his arm, the muscles of which were screaming for release. "Do not lie to me," Kabuto said in a low voice. "I am trying to give you the kind of basic training you should have gotten years ago, but I cannot help you if you do not cooperate with me." Kabuto released Naruto, who sat back and flexed his arm, already feeling the viciously strained and torn muscles flex and reattach, though they would still ache for another quarter of an hour at least.

Kabuto, already seated once again in his chair on the other side of the table, turned to a few pages before the one that had been bookmarked so that the book was open at the beginning of a chapter. "Do attend," Kabuto said, slightly mockingly, in Naruto's opinion. The blonde-haired boy glowered. "If you allow me to teach you the basics, like reading and chakra control, early on, it paves the way for me to teach you more advanced jutsu and techniques later on; maybe not even that much later on if you just pay attention now."

"Do I really have a choice here?" Naruto asked, rubbing his upper arm.

"Not really, although your attitude and compliance will dictate how much, if any, pressure I exert on you in order to gain your cooperation." Naruto's blue eyes flicked back and forth between Kabuto's black eyes, unsure what to make of the older boy. There was a gleam in Kabuto's eyes and the merest suggestion of a smile around the serious mouth, signs that Naruto's common sense told him he should not test, as they were those of a mind that would come unhinged if presented with the wrong set of answers and should, therefore, be obeyed, at least for the time being.

Naruto gave a long, reluctant sigh. "Alright then. If it means I can learn new jutsu sooner, let's just get this over with." So Kabuto began to teach Naruto, letting him practice reading the medical journals and textbooks. Naruto's recognition and inference skills increased at a truly startling pace, and it was no more than a week before Kabuto was almost forced to ask why Naruto had barely been able to read before if he naturally learned so incredibly swiftly.

Naruto rubbed the back of his head uncomfortably. "It's hard to learn fast when the teacher has a class of more than thirty kids and you're the youngest one. My sensei's couldn't slow it down for me to let me catch up or teach me one-on-one," he said, considering.

"Nonsense. You're a natural; it's not possible that that's the only reason," _Unless it is some effect of the Kyuubi objecting to us tampering with Naruto's DNA. Or maybe it's simply that I'm an even better teacher than Orochimaru-sama thought I was._

"Well, I guess being forced to leave the classroom and sit out in the hallway at least three or four times a week, sometimes for hours at a time, may not have helped," Naruto admitted, oblivious to Kabuto's private conjectures.

Kabuto pushed his round glasses up on his nose, giving Naruto a smile that actually held a modicum of genuine pleasure, for a wonder. "Your progress is advancing at a sufficient pace, meaning that it's time I began training you to control your chakra a bit better." _Though, hopefully, his chakra control will improve once we give him the puppet-user's DNA, meaning I won't have to rely on him grasping this on his own. From what I was told, his chakra control is almost as abysmal as his literacy was, though, unlike reading, this most likely won't be a thing he'll be able to just pick up naturally without working at it._

Naruto's eyes were crossed from staring at the leaf that rested on his forehead. Kabuto sighed in exasperation. "Don't you know how to channel chakra to different parts of your body?" Kabuto asked.

Naruto shook his head, momentarily forgetting the leaf and quickly catching it before it could flutter to the floor. "Cut me some slack; I'm just a kid," Naruto said, a slight edge to his voice. He did not like it when Kabuto made it sound like Naruto should have been born knowing things that he had never been taught, as if Naruto were somehow inferior or substandard.

Kabuto opened his mouth to reply, but paused, realizing he had been about to start a sentence with 'When I was your age,' which would not have been received well. Instead, he said, "I cannot cut you any slack. To do so would be to belittle your prospects as a shinobi."

"No, to do so would be to cut me a little slack and actually teach and show me instead of just lecturing. It would be more use," Naruto countered, tilting his head back once more to balance the leaf on his forehead.

Naruto actually made a fair point, though Kabuto would never admit it, and so the silver-haired boy resigned himself to explaining the basics of chakra systems and flow patterns, tenketsu, and how to channel chakra without using a handseal to mold it. It took a good hour or so to give Naruto a basic sketch of everything he wanted to know, even though the boy seemed only to have to hear a thing once in order to commit it to memory. The entire time that Kabuto spoke, Naruto stared at the leaf between his eyes. He was actually trying to follow the instructions that Kabuto gave him as the silver-haired boy gave them to him, trying to guess the next step before Kabuto could outline it in his quiet, precise voice.

When he had, for the most part, finished speaking, Kabuto leaned against the wall, watching Naruto struggle and making comments and suggestions, which he thought of as helpful rather than irritating.

Meanwhile, Naruto was definitely starting to develop a headache, what with trying to focus his chakra through a point on his face that he couldn't even see and keeping his head tipped back, and staring at something right between his eyes, and trying to recall how Kabuto had said to do it, and trying to simultaneously heed Kabuto's comments and block out their more distracting and downright irritating aspects…. Finally, Kabuto left, telling Naruto to knock on the door, which was, of course, locked from the outside, when he was finished for the day.

Naruto let his aching neck relax as his head fell forward. He didn't even bother catching the leaf as it spiraled to the tiled floor. _I know it can be done, and I know that I won't be taken any farther until I master this, so I'll just have to keep practicing. Maybe I'm concentrating too much on focusing the chakra. Maybe Kabuto's skipping a step without realizing it. Maybe I have to be able to channel a lot of chakra before I can work it down to something smaller that I can control. In which case, why do I have to start with my head?_

Naruto sat down, leaning his stiff back against the wall as he crossed his legs. The smooth wall seemed to be doing his neck and back some good, as he barely felt the soreness at all now, and his headache was almost gone. Naruto cupped his hands together, supporting the right one in his left and resting them in his lap, holding the leaf. Naruto closed his eyes and anxiously searched himself all over for his core, for the center of his chakra system, the chakra coils, as Kabuto had explained to him. He found them, a sort of pulsing of energy, not unlike a heartbeat, around the vicinity of his navel. And, again like a heartbeat or pulse, he could almost trace its path by the pressure and energy it brought throughout his body. However, the sensation was so faint that he couldn't be more than half sure that the pathways were really there at all, that he wasn't projecting upon himself sensations that he hoped and expected to feel.

_Oh, what the hell, it's worth a shot,_ He thought. Carefully, he imagined drawing the energy from his core, forcing it through a network of paths no wider than threads until it pooled in the palm of his right hand. A slight smile flickered across Naruto's face as he noticed the leaf flutter and lift slightly, as though it was sitting on top of a puddle of water. Sitting there long enough to get the technique to work had not taken very long by anyone's standards, but Naruto was renowned for his hyperactivity, and while some if it was an act, a front, and just a bit of it had been ironed out of him already during his brief stay in Orochimaru's hospitalities, Naruto still preferred moving to sitting still, and got up to pace, wishing that he was already proficient enough to practice leaf-floating as he moved.

A few days later, the leaf once again perched on his forehead, Naruto screwed up his eyes. A strong gust of chakra, so saturated that Naruto could practically smell, it, lifted the leaf a good five inches into the air and held it there for a split second, before it tumbled, flipping end over end until it slid to rest on the smooth tiles.

Kabuto surveyed Naruto critically. "You're wasting far too much chakra," he commented, uncrossing his arms and stepping forward from where he leaned against the wall in order to pick up the fallen leaf. "Your chakra is spraying out in all directions. The whole point of chakra control is to focus that energy into a single point and direct in that way. Thus," Kabuto stripped off one of his gloves, laying the leaf on the exposed palm and, in a moment, sending the leaf spinning toward the ceiling. As it fell, Kabuto caught it, having had time to pull his glove back on, and offered the leaf to Naruto with a courtly bow. Naruto resisted the urge to break the silver-haired boy's glasses.

It was another week before Naruto could float the leaf above his head at a constant height of three inches for minutes on end. In the process of learning to do that, he had also learned to float the same leaf above each of his hands, though it took him a few seconds longer to get the leaf aloft above his left hand than it did his right. He was starting to hate that leaf, seriously and personally.

While he was struggling with that, Kabuto began to train him physically as well and assigning Naruto passages to read each night. Naruto would normally have been of the opinion that the work load was worse than that of the academy, but to his mild surprise, he found that he was quite enjoying all of it. Even the reading material was interesting, though he still had to refer to the lexicon that Kabuto had supplied him with, so that the reading assignments took longer than usual, as Naruto was actually trying to piece together the words and understand them. Some of them were myths and stories about the bijuu and some were scientific and medical journals. Some spoke of chakra theory in such a way that Naruto no longer wondered why Kabuto had been so condescending when he had discovered how poor Naruto's chakra control was. Naruto resolved to begin improving fast enough to make Kabuto seriously worried about his own status as a proficient chakra-user.

The physical part of Naruto's training was even more interesting, consisting of everything from flexibility to brute strength, from aiming projectiles to strategy. Here, when Kabuto found that Naruto had more-or-less perfected leaf floating, he began to introduce chakra to the physical training. Almost the first thing on his list to teach to Naruto was to sick to surfaces using chakra.

At first, he went about it the traditional way, showing Naruto how to channel chakra through his feet and his ninja sandals, and then how to adhere that chakra to vertical surfaces, creating a bond that could support weight. Naruto wasn't very good at waiting for his chakra to bond firmly, and consequently would often try to put weight on a foot that was barely stuck onto the wall at all, resulting in a lot of flailing and quality time with the floor. Kabuto, impatient with these results, devised a new way of doing things.

"Climb!" Kabuto yelled, loosing a hail of shuriken. Naruto scrambled up as fast as he could, zigzagging up the vertical surface as though it was nothing more than a flat parquet floor. The first few times Kabuto had done this, Naruto had gotten pierced quite a lot, mostly in the back, as he struggled to make his chakra bond, but he had soon gotten better both at dodging and sticking. As he raced across the ceiling, he reflected drily that the least Kabuto could have done would be to give Naruto a kunai or shuriken to deflect the projectiles.

No sooner than Naruto had developed a rough grasp of sticking to surfaces, than Kabuto began showing Naruto how to enhance his muscles with chakra, prolonging how long Naruto could run or fight or how far he could jump. Naruto though this was a bit sadistic and underhanded, as it gave Kabuto an excuse to train Naruto for hours on end each day, insisting that Naruto perform complicated manuvers and exercises daily, building up strength and chakra reserves alike and only allowing him one day off a week for pure study without any physical enterprises. Naruto would spar with Kabuto, taking to the walls and ceiling to avoid the older boy's wild attacks and projectiles. When they were locked in those brief flurries of close combat, not once did Naruto emerge victorious. Always he was distracted by Kabuto's illusory clones or by Kabuto's use of chakra scalpels or the kind of ninja tools that Naruto was never supplied with.

It wasn't long before Kabuto began talking about teaching Naruto how to make clones of his own or to henge, or even to kawirimi, things, as the silver-haired boy pointed out, that any academy graduate could do. "But before I start you on any of those jutsu, I have something else in mind," Kabuto said.

Naruto looked up from the book in his lap, legs out straight on his bed, it being his day off. "What do you want, Kabuto?" Naruto asked. He had quickly discovered that it did no good to be polite to Kabuto, as the older boy did not seem to care one way or the other if Naruto was rude. In fact, from time to time Naruto got the impression that the older boy like being stood up to- liked a challenge. Not at the moment, though, it seemed.

"I have a visitor for you. She's going to be training you in a very specific form of jutsu, but before you meet her, I need you to come with me. You're due for another test."

Naruto raised an eyebrow, not stirring an inch. He could recognize the bribe; cooperate and take the test and not only learn a new jutsu, learn it from someone other than Kabuto. "Test?" he asked innocently.

"Remember that you are only here to be trained on the condition that you take these tests for us, Naruto," Kabuto said pleasantly, though with an undertone that suggested trouble if Naruto was to try and pretend otherwise.

Naruto sighed, dropping the book onto the mattress, which creaked as he swung himself off, ready to follow Kabuto. Kabuto waited until Naruto was out in the hallway before joining him and locking the door behind. Naruto followed Kabuto back to the room where he had first woken up, the room with the shiny, metal table.

By now, Naruto knew enough about rudimentary medicine to recognize it as an operating room, a surprisingly underequipped one, too, unless all of the necessary tools and materials were securely shut away behind the cabinet doors or locked in the drawers. As a result, he was even more wary than the first time this had happened when Kabuto handed him a glass and told him to drink. He couldn't remember drinking anything like it before- the result of a mild anesthetic mixed in, though he wasn't to know that- but he had an inkling from the substance's scent that this didn't bode well. However, Naruto, foolish though it was, trusted Kabuto not to poison him after all the training the older boy had put his way, though he did find his blue eyes straying to the tinted mirror set into the wall. He looked away with a shiver of misplaced memories and half-recollections. Hadn't this happened before? If so, why didn't he remember more clearly? His head swam.

"Drink it, Naruto," Kabuto insisted. And Naruto, against his better judgment, did as he was told.

Kabuto once again rescued the glass before it could smash and scooped Naruto up, laying him out on the table and securely strapping him down before busying himself hooking the supine boy up to the various monitors and meters. Kabuto paused for the briefest moment in his preparations, gloved fingers light and tense on the boy's wrist, listening, giving the smallest of satisfied smiles when he heard the door behind him swing open, when he saw a pale blur of a man reflected in the tinted mirror on the wall directly in front of him. Schooling his expression, Kabuto once again returned to the task of preparing the boy as Orochimaru came up beside him and looked down into the face of the sleeping boy.

"I have read your reports and projections, Kabuto, and must say that the first month of this project has been progressing admirably under your command."

"Thank you, Orochimaru-sama. Which one this time?"

Orochimaru drew a small vial of watery purple liquid from his pocket; clearly the sample had been treated and diluted since Kabuto had last seen it. For a moment, Orochimaru held up the vial, eyes flickering between it and the sleeping face of the boy. Finally, he handed the vial to Kabuto. "Start training him to manipulate puppets, but do not tell him what kind of puppets he's working up to. Keep him reading medical texts, if you can. It will be very useful if he can create a puppet before I can possess him, as his chakra will then already be familiar with it and his muscles adapted to puppet work. But no human puppets too soon- we don't want to break his spirit this early. That would lead to complications. See to it." He left.

"Yes, Orochimaru-sama," Kabuto muttered, as the door swung closed. He proceeded to see to it, priming the needle. _I told Orochimaru-sama that this blood would most likely improve the boy's chakra control, which is still painful to consider, but I'm not entirely sure that will be the case. Of course there may also be some mental ramifications, but mostly I suspect that Orochimaru-sama just skipped to the part of my report that talked about the boy's puppet abilities._

The deed at hand completed, Kabuto sat down to monitor Naruto's vitals, mostly focusing on the brain patterns and chakra levels. _Meanwhile, assuming this transfusion will be as much of a success as the last one, the boy will have two powers that he's not being told about. Dangerous. At least he won't have to wonder about this one, since I'll be teaching him to manipulate puppets at first. Perhaps it would be beneficial to have him build the wooden puppets he'll be practicing with. Then he'll have something to practice sealing on, too. _Kabuto believed in killing two birds with one jutsu.

When Naruto came-to, he was once again in his bed and, once again, ravenously hungry. He made to get out of bed, but his knees seemed like they had forgotten which way they were supposed to bend. _How long was I out?_ Naruto wondered. It wasn't too long before he was able to totter to the window, tapping on the mirrored glass. Kabuto answered the unceremonious summons, bringing with him a welcome change of clothing and an even more welcome tray of food. Naruto attacked it as only one who has been truly hungry before could understand.

When he was finished, Kabuto held out a hand for the tray, which Naruto handed him. "Get dressed now, and when you're ready, I'll introduce you to someone you may be interested to meet."

Kabuto paused, one foot outside the door, as Naruto, who had not spoken since he had woken up, croaked a question. "Will I be meeting your master?" Kabuto didn't often speak of his elusive master, but never had he mentioned the man's name, Naruto noticed, and whenever the silver-haired boy spoke of the man, it was with a note of reverence in his tone.

"No, Naruto. It is not yet time for you to meet my master. That time won't be for a while. Probably not until the end, in fact. For now, get dressed and when you're ready, you'll meet her, the woman who'll start to teach you a new jutsu." Kabuto left Naruto to scramble into the new clothes, which didn't take more than a minute.

As Kabuto still hadn't returned, Naruto decided to try leaf floating out of sheer boredom. He didn't actually have a leaf with him, but he had the thin strip of paper that he used as a bookmark. It should have been just as easy, but Naruto discovered that he couldn't shift the paper an inch. It lay in his hand, lifeless, useless.

When Kabuto reentered the room, Naruto was panicking slightly. He shook the strip of paper in Kabuto's bemused face the moment the older boy was close enough. Kabuto's first thought was _Oh shit, he's found out about what Konan's DNA allows him to do…_ Then it occurred to him to actually listen to what Naruto was half-screaming.

"What did you do? I can't float anything! You took away my chakra! How am I not dead? Tell me! Tell me!" Kabuto smacked Naruto.

"Get a grip on yourself. Your chakra is intact. We didn't do anything to you."

"Then why won't this work?" Naruto demanded, holding out the strip of paper as though it were damning evidence.

Kabuto signed, feigning regret. "I was hoping you wouldn't notice. With all of the jutsu you're being taught, my master deemed it prudent to prevent jutsu from being performed in this room."  
"Why?"

"You're progressing at a remarkable rate, it's actually quite alarming. We sealed this room on the off chance that you should, at any point, lose control of your chakra. It rarely ever happens, but you are very valuable to us, and my master wanted to make absolutely certain. Therefore, you can only use your chakra in one of the designated rooms in which you have been training, and not in here." _Although, with all of the ways in which we're planning to edit your DNA, it may just be that these seals won't apply to you anymore, soon. But I'm certainly not going to tell you that._

Naruto accepted the explanation with a mixture of relief and regret. "Anyway," he said, never one to let panic attacks trouble him for long, Kabuto noticed sourly, "Who's this person I'm meeting? What jutsu will she- you said she before- be teaching me?"

"All in good time, Naruto. Don't you want it to be a surprise?"

"I hate surprises. They always seem to end in near-fatal accidents," Naruto said cheerfully and sincerely.

Kabuto, who was in a bad mood, gave up and just walked on in silence, letting Naruto's chatter wash over him, replying in monosyllabic grunts and sidelong glares. Eventually, Naruto fell into a hurt silence, plodding along beside the taller boy.

At last they reached a door, which Kabuto unlocked and ushered Naruto through. The younger boy stopped inside, waiting for Kabuto, but the older boy shook his head. "She has her instructions. I'll keep an eye on you two, but you're going in alone. Good luck. Who knows, you might enjoy it." Kabuto closed the door behind Naruto, who looked around. There room was at least twice the size of his own bedroom. On one wall was a long, low bookshelf, packed to bursting with tomes and scrolls. Nearby was a table loaded blank paper, scrolls, inks of various colours, pens, and one or two wooden practice weapons. There was a familiar-looking tinted, one-way mirror set into the wall opposite the door.

And in the centre of the room was a table, at which sat a woman. A thin, pale woman with violet eyes and unusually long red hair. And she was staring at Naruto as though she had seen a ghost.


	3. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The Kyuubi attack. Though it lasted considerably less than twenty-four hours, it was an event that would live forever in infamy for the citizens of Konoha. Arguably, the catastrophic event was even more devastating than the three Great Shinobi Wars that had preceded it. It was a day of panic, chaos, and destruction. Families were slaughtered, separated, young children watched their parents die before their eyes, whole sectors of the mighty village were flattened. The shinobi did all they could to restrain the beast, but they were no match. They were cut down in swaths. It was so much worse than a war. It was genocide.

Until one man stepped forward. A man who, far from lurking behind the scenes pulling strings and giving orders as he could have been doing, had been fighting on the front line the entire time. Finally, sweating, shaking, chakra too low for comfort, he conceded to the one course of action that he ought to have known from the start was the only way.

He retired to his wife's side. She was pale and sweating, but her eyes shone brightly, attentively, as she clutched her newborn son. Minato sighed. Kushina did not deserve this. Did not deserve all that had happened on that day; having her son threatened and then snatched away from her mere hours after he had been born, having the demon fox ripped from her body. _And she doesn't deserve what I'm about to do to her. If she never forgives me, it will be too merciful a punishment for what I've done_, Minato thought, staring sadly at Kushina. How strong she looked despite the fact that she was exhausted beyond belief and had not risen to greet him.

"Minato. How goes it? Do you need my help?" Kushina sat up, carefully shifting Naruto in her arms as she moved.

"As a matter of fact, I do, Kushina, badly. It is a thing I would never ask of you unless the circumstances were dire. And they are. In fact, dire is too small a word for it. Appalling. Cataclysmic." Kushina studied the man before her, the man she loved more than any other, save perhaps the child in her arms. His face was a smorgasbord of emotions; terror, guilt, determination, and sorrow.

"You're not here to discuss semantics. Minato, what's going on? If what you have to ask of me is so important, then get on with it, or isn't time of the essence?"

"It is indeed." Minato approached Kushina and crouched beside her bed. Leaning forward and putting a hand on her shoulder, he rested the cold, smooth metal of his hitai-ate against Kushina's forehead for a brief moment, before shifting so he could whisper in her ear. After less than a minute, he felt the red-haired woman stiffen.

Careful not to disturb Naruto, Kushina put out a hand and placed it on Minato's shoulder, moving him back just far enough so that she could look him right in the eyes. She seemed to stare for an eternity. Minato could not gather anything at all from her expression and resisted both the urge to fidget and to remind her that precious seconds were slipping away.

Finally, Kushina asked in a calculated, clinical voice, "How many deaths?"

"If I do not do this, perhaps hundreds of thousands," Minato replied.

"And there's no other way?"

"Believe me, if there were one more way, _just one, any_ one, I would act on it in an instant. But I can see no other way. Naruto should be none the worse for it, though. After all, you were fine, and he's still an Uzumaki by blood."

Kushina's eyes narrowed. "It is not the life I would have chosen for him."

"Nor me. But we can help. He won't be alone."

Kushina sighed. She lifted the baby whom she still held and looked him full in the face. Naruto sleepily blinked eyes as brilliant a blue as those of his father. "You look like him," Kushina murmured. She drew a long, shuddering breath. "Take care of him, Naruto. I love you." She softly kissed the boy on the forehead, gave him one finally squeeze, and then held him out to Minato, who received the boy reverently, blinking tears out of his eyes.

"Kushina, I-" but the red-haired woman cut him off.

"I know. I love you, too. _Both _of you. No matter what. Just do me a favor and come back afterwards."

He heaved a ragged breath. "Please stay safe. It will all be over soon, and then we can be together again." Kushina nodded mutely as Minato wrapped Naruto securely in his blanket. Then Minato disappeared in the smallest wisp of smoke, meeting Kushina's eyes one last time as he vanished.

Minato walled up his emotions, penning them into a tiny corner in his mind into which he refused to look. He had to be completely objective, to forget whom he was condemning to a life bound to the most powerful demon of the nine bijuu.

And, of course, he was trying to forget about what he was preparing to do to himself. He had known all along that it was not possible for him to either seal all of the Kyuubi's power away or to kill it. Therefore, he would have to do both- seal half of the power and kill the rest. Seal it in himself and kill it. And him with it.

The seal, an elaborate variation on a basic storage seal, took no more than a scant ten minutes to complete for one such as Minato who had trained in fuinjutsu under Kushina. He wished it could have taken ten years, that he could have stretched out the time between then and when he would have to look upon his son for the last time.

Minato knew he was already dying. His fight with Madara had weakened him, the Kyuubi had injured him, and his chakra was quickly dwindling after hours of battling on the front line. He had already arranged his contract with the Shinigami so that he would seize what was left of the Kyuubi when he would be coming for Minato's soul anyway, and take both with him to the realm of the deceased. In effect, he was already dead. The Minato that still walked the earth, the Minato who still held breath in his lungs, the Minato about to seal his son's fate as readily as he had sealed his own, that Minato was little more than a specter, and imprint of his living self, going about unfinished business before it would be allowed to rest in peace. Forevermore.

Minato had dispatched messages to both Jiraiya and Sarutobi with specific instructions regarding Naruto and Kushina. All that remained was to act. Stepping out from what shelter flimsy walls, fragile windows, and shoddy roofing could provide from the raging beast, Minato summoned his old, trusted comrade, Gamabunta, a toad of such immensity that it rivaled even the Kyuubi no Yoko. Or so Minato hoped. The plan was not to get Gamabunta killed, after all, by pitting him against someone too far out of his weight class strength-wise.

"Gamabunta, I'm sorry to ask this of you, but can you possibly hold him off for a bit while I do this?" Minato called, perched atop the great toad's skull.

"That little guy? Not a chance. I can buy you maybe a minute or two at a stretch, but there's no chance of me holding it off for any longer."

"A minute should be enough. And Gamabunta?"

"Yes?"

"Thank you. For everything. Goodbye, my friend."

Gamabunta did not respond, Toads not being prone to overly emotional displays, instead he approached the snapping, snarling demon with several long bounds. "Here fluffy, fluffy, fluffy…" With a slithering clang he drew his enormous tanto and moved in to engage to the fox, fending off tails left and right. Narrowly, he dodged an imari. He darted and leaped, cavorted and slashed, not allowing the Kyuubi to take its attention from him for even a moment. "Whenever you're ready," He growled to Minato.

"Right." Minato took a deep breath and unwrapped the blanket that coddled his son. For a moment he gazed at Naruto, and a certain sense of surrealism seemed to assert itself. _Standing on a giant toad, facing down a fox that would like nothing better than the death of every human in existence, and nothing separates my dying in vain and my dying a hero but a few lines of ink and an infant. May as well get on with it._ Bracing his feet to stabilize himself against Gamabunta's erratic movements, he began making one-handed seals. In less than ten seconds, the command was complete. The message had been sent. The end was now.

Several unsteady seconds passed, Minato, unwilling to turn around, to stare death in the face sooner than absolutely necessary, on tenterhooks, waiting to feel something. Without warning, Minato experienced a curious, rather unpleasant fluttering sensation in the vicinity of his chest. He looked down to see the altogether terrifying sight of a hand forcing through his body as if he were no more than a cloud of steam. A purple, larger-than life hand extending right through the center of his chest. Though Minato was frozen to the spot, unable to twist around and check, he knew that behind him loomed the Shinigami, god of death, a knife in his teeth and a vortex in his eyes. _As of now, my patron god._

The wrist and forearm to which the hand was attached suddenly lengthened, and Minato gasped as his eyes automatically tracked the movements the appendage, unable to feel it at all, save for a very faint, unpleasant dragging sensation in his chest cavity. Minato was forced to watch as the powerful hand seized hold of the thrashing demon and dragged it back, closer and closer to Minato and the bundle of blanket that he clutched.

Working swiftly and deftly, the Shinigami lopped off a good half off the mass of Youki and reeled it in, accompanied by the screeches and growls of the beast as it recognized what was happening. It struggled harder than ever against the grip of the god, writhing and slashing and biting, but to no avail.

Dazedly, gazing at the purple hand, half deafened by the commotion, Minato watched in admiration as the Shinigami neatly coiled the Youki, draining it into the seal painted over Naruto's abdomen and fixing it there with an elegant sealing that would have taken Minato several lifetimes to duplicate. That task was finished in under a minute and it was only once Minato felt the prickling on the back of his neck and the shifting sensation in his chest that meant that the Shinigami had moved on to him that he registered Naruto's crying, his wails vying with those of the greatly weakened Kyuubi.

_Greatly weakened, but still a threat. No backing out. I'm sorry, Naruto._ Once again the purple hand extended and seized the thrashing, screaming demon. This time, Minato though he could just here the great Death God's voice whispering, resonating in his own mind.

With a cold slithering rush, the great hand was jerked out of Minato's body, dragging the Kyuubi's remaining Youki through after, sealing it as it entered Minato's chest so that all that the hand was pulling out of the other side was a thin, translucent, anguished _something._ Minato's soul, held painfully tightly by the hair, dragged from the realm of the living, the newly constructed seal on its stomach glowing with malignant red light. That soul, the very human essence of the best-loved Hokage ever to grace the village with his affections, was gone, pulled down to the depths of the realm of death, over which the Shinigami held court. And the last and the most terrible of the nine bijuu with it.

Kushina had still been weak and it was several days before she was strong enough to leave the safe house in which she had been left outside of the village. Out of danger.

In the confusion of the aftermath of the Kyuubi attack, amid the rubble and stricken villagers, it was an easy task to get back within the partially pulverized walls, a fact that worried Kushina slightly. These trivial worries were swept away at once, however, when she learned what had become of her family. When Kushina learned of Minato's death, she was in paroxysms of grief. _Who gave him permission to sacrifice his own life and leave me here, stranded amongst the living with our son? What gives him the right to lay down his life for this village even if it means abandoning his family? _And yet Kushina knew that what her husband had done was right. This was how it should be. The great leader risking it all for his people. In a way, under the fury, shock and anguish, Kushina was more proud of her husband than she had ever been in his life. And that's what really broke her heart.

But Kushina was a tough, seasoned kunoichi and an Uzumaki to boot, so, repressing her sorrow for the time being, she set out to discover what had become of her newborn child. There would be time enough to grieve later.

Kushina stood before Sarutobi's desk. She had been completely surprised when, for the first time ever, she had had to make an appointment to see the old man. But, after all, Konoha was far from repaired- not even close- and it suddenly seemed as though the Hokage was needed everywhere at once. Even as Kushina stood before him, Sarutobi was busily signing some of the papers he had dragged from under the massive drift that obscured his desk and puddled on the floor around it. Sarutobi's words were clipped, hectic, distracted.

"I'm sorry Kushina, the orphanages are completely flooded. All of them. Overflowing and understaffed. We've had to beg some of the larger clans and civilian families with homes still standing to take in children with no place to stay. And Kusagakure and Yugakure are being absolutely no help at all. I'm meeting with them later today, but my hopes aren't high. What orphanage records exist are in utter chaos and so many of my best shinobi were killed that I can't spare you any at all. We're spread far too thin as it is. If any of the other elemental nations took in into their heads to attack us right now, we would fall, no doubt about it."

Kushina held her temper in check, but her voice came out sharp nonetheless. "Hokage-sama, I understand how disorganized everything is at this time, but Naruto isn't just any child. He is a Jinchuriki and he is Minato's son. It is as much his doing that Konoha still exists at all as it is my husband's. If you can't bring yourself to spare one single ANBU to help me find him, at least promise not to prevent me doing whatever I deem necessary to find my child. You owe me that much. You owe _Minato_ far more than that much."

Sarutobi sighed, his pen ceasing for a moment in its relentless signing. He did not make eye contact with Kushina, but spoke quietly to the papers before him. "No one's denying what your husband did or how important it is to find Naruto. I might be able to have ANBU free to begin assisting you in looking for him in as soon as a month or two. But for now you'll have to search alone. And yes, before you ask again, of course you have permission to do whatever you deem necessary to find Naruto."

"Thank you, Hokage-sama," Kushina said tightly, wheeling on the spot and marching out of the office. She slid the door shut behind her with a clap, which caused a small avalanche of papers to slide off of the heaps on Sarutobi's desk and join their brethren on the floor.

Sarutobi let out a tired sigh, gathered up the papers he had signed already and his notes for the meeting with the representatives from Kusagakure and Yugakure, picked up his hat, and left, sliding the door closed much more gently than Kushina had done, blocking out the depressing sight of the drifts of fluttering whiteness.

Kushina spent weeks scouring the village. Consequently, she got to see the extent of the damage the Kyuubi had wrought. Homes and shops were demolished, cutting a huge swath of destruction through the once-teeming village, which marked the path of the mighty demon. Bricks had been reduced to dust and rubble and trees were little more than ash and kindling. Though bodies no longer littered the streets, those having been the first priorities to be cleared away, rusty red-brown stains of dried blood still decorated the streets in certain sectors of the village. The sights of destruction sent shivers chasing down Kushina's back. She had no trouble picturing her son as one of those who had died, bleeding out, crying, alone… _No. Minato would have made sure to get Naruto to safety before… Well, he would have made sure our son was safe._

Kushina also discovered fairly early in her rounds of the various orphanages, well the ones that remained after the attack, anyway, quite a few of the 'orphanages' were actually different buildings that had been repurposed after the attack, that Sarutobi had not been exaggerating. It was, quite simply, utter chaos. There were far too many children crammed into each orphanage and nowhere near enough adults to keep track of them. Quite a few of the older children had taken charge, helping out wherever they could. Kushina described Naruto to those who were supposed to be taking care of the children as best she could, but most of the time, whoever she was speaking to would not even be able to tell her how many children there were in the building, let alone if there was one specific child who matched her description. In addition to this, there were a few clans and quite a large number of civilians who had taken in a couple of children each and it was impossible for her to find and search all of these places single-handedly. And yet she persisted, despite the fact that the children didn't so much as stay in the same place from day to day, shuffled from one orphanage to another, or moving out to live with a new family.

After three weeks, just when things were starting to calm down and Kushina despaired of ever seeing her son again, she began to hear the most intriguing rumors. It seemed that Orochimaru, Kushina gave the faintest of shudders- she had heard that name from Minato's old sensei, Jiraiya, and never accompanied by any story she would describe as 'palatable'- was collecting children. On the surface, this seemed a simple enough gesture, providing care and shelter to a large number of orphaned children of various ages in order to ease Konoha's troubles, even a little. But Kushina couldn't help but be suspicious of the Snake sannin, particularly as the rumors seemed to suggest that his methods for gathering the children weren't completely, shall we say, legitimate.

All the same, she had not yet found her son, and now that she knew that a large number of children from Konoha were in the care of Orochimaru, she knew her next destination, the next place she would look.

When the red-haired woman approached the pale sannin, Orochimaru's pulse quickened and he had to work hard to disguise both his surprise and his greed. The Hot-Blooded Habanero of Konoha! Seal mistress and the Yondaime's widow. It was a minute before Orochimaru understood what she was asking him. _So, Kushina Uzumaki has misplaced her son and thinks I may have inadvertently collected him? Perhaps I can use this to my advantage._ And so Orochimaru began to speak, spinning Kushina an elaborate lie. Yes, of course, Kushina-san, I have an infant who fits your description. Blue eyes and blonde hair? Whisker marks on his cheeks? That's the one. And if you come with me, you will be reunited shortly. No, no trouble, I'll take you there personally.

Orochimaru led her to one of his old, all but abandoned bases, no more than a temporary bolt hole, really, conveniently situated just outside the confines of Konoha. Orochimaru crossed quickly to the cabinets, trying not to draw attention to the dust that had settled there of late. Quickly, with his back turned so that Kushina could not see, Orochimaru extracted three glass vials from the cabinet and, double-checking the labels, wiped out a slightly gritty glass with a rag and poured in the liquids, as well as a shot of sake. He turned back to Kushina, smiling, holding the glass. Would you like a drink, Kushina-san, before we go retrieve your son? He is being treated perfectly well of course. Go on, have a drink. Really? Was he sure? Oh well, all right then.

Orochimaru watched Kushina give the drink a discreet sniff. He held his breath. But he needn't have worried. Apparently not detecting anything under the smell of the sake, and anyway, relief about being finally reunited with her son, whom she hadn't seen since the day of his birth, making her less cautious then she would ordinarily be, Kushina took a sip. Tasting nothing but slightly diluted sake, Kushina finished off the glass. Now, would Orochimaru please take her to her son?

"But of course, Kushina-san. This was just a short stop I had to make on the way to pick something up. Come along." Turning away, Orochimaru caught a flicker of apprehension on Kushina's face, but she followed him without hesitation when they began travelling farther and farther from Konoha.

They were less than a quarter of a mile from their destination when Kushina began to sway. Her leaps- they were, naturally, travelling shinobi-style, leaping from branch to branch- grew sloppy and uncoordinated. Finally, Orochimaru was just in time to catch Kushina before she fell out of the tree and hit the hard earth. From there, it was a luckily short distance to carry her.

When Orochimaru arrived at his private lab, he handed the unconscious woman to one of his lab assistants with instructions to lock her up in one of the cells with the chakra-dampening seals in the walls, inaccessible to the seal mistress so there would be no tampering. The assistant bowed his head and scurried off, the red-haired woman's head lolling against his chest.

Orochimaru then turned to another one of assistants and gave him specific instructions about what Kushina was to be fed for the duration of her stay. While that assistant left to follow Orochimaru's directions, the Snake sannin stood perfectly still, allowing his shoulders to relax and his breathing to slow for a moment. Standing by himself in the middle of one of his labs, Orochimaru gave a thin, tight-lipped smile. Making his way to his study, he decided to catch up on reading some of the newer report files from his experiments there before his new prisoner woke up.

A few hours later a lab assistant tapped timidly on the study door and entered bearing a tray of food. "The prisoner is awake, Orochimaru-sama," the man said, holding out the tray.

Orochimaru stood and crossed to the door, relieving the man of the tray as he went. Making his way down to the holding cells, Orochimaru enjoyed, as always, the effect that his mere presence had among his captives. Some fell silent and shrank away from the doors of their cells while others threw themselves against the doors, screaming insults and trying to get at the pale man.

However, Orochimaru soon passed through this section and within a minute was walking among the isolation rooms, each one soundproofed and sealed to dampen the chakra of the occupant. Stopping before one particular door and sparing a hand to unlock the door, Orochimaru paused only to cloak himself in a jutsu that, while not able to completely mitigate the chakra-dampening seals, would nonetheless stop him from feeling the drain quite as much as the prisoner would.

Orochimaru entered, not fearing that the prisoner would try to escape as she was weak and groggy from the anesthetic he had given her and, in any case, was cuffed and bound to the wall by a length of chain. Orochimaru set down the tray of food and sat down with his back against the wall.

Kushina, who was seated as he was, with her back against the wall opposite the door, did not move toward the tray. Her eyes followed her captor mistrustfully. _Ah, good. I should have known she wasn't one of those prisoners who is too naïve to realize she has been tricked. That will save me having to explain._

After allowing the silence to stretch on uninterrupted for several minutes, Orochimaru broke it. "I suggest you eat the food I brought, Uzumaki-san. If your stubbornness persists and you refuse, I can guarantee you'll be dead before the day is out." Orochimaru, watching Kushina's eyes through the semi-darkness, caught a flash of what could best be described as scorn. "You don't believe me? Well consider this. You don't really think that sake and the anesthetic were the only things you drank, do you?"

This time, a look of accusation crossed Kushina's face. "I see you refuse to speak. But worry not, I'll answer the question that must be on the tip of your tongue." A humorless smile stretched the waxy skin across the Snake sannin's sharp cheekbones. "Now, Orochimaru-sama, what else did you put in Kushina's drink?" he mused to himself. He pretended to think, studying Kushina out of the corner of his eye, his gaze never leaving her face. "Well, Orochimaru-sama," he answered himself, "I may have possibly slipped in a little squatter poison. Harmless, really, or at least, it will be to Kushina if she continues taking the antidote that I was thoughtful enough to put in her drink."

There was no denying it, Kushina had definitely looked alarmed when he mentioned the squatter poison. "So you see, Kushina, that poison will sit in your body for as long as I want it to, months, years, decades, even, but only if you keep taking the antidote. Miss even one dosage and the poison will begin to act within six hours. You will die by inches. Sometimes it takes as much as two weeks to die of this particular poison. Imagine it; two weeks of agony, of sweat and screaming until you're so hoarse that the pain even prevents you from blacking out and escaping in that way. And what a shame that would be, if you were to die here in this little cell, away from anyone who would care if you were to cease to exist. I guess that would make your son, little Naruto, an orphan, wouldn't it?"

Orochimaru paused. Looking for a reaction. At the mention of her son, Kushina seemed to withdraw into herself, her eyes became blank and dull and her shoulders slumped a fraction of an inch. Orochimaru knew he had her. It was time to leave. Orochimaru stood up and opened the door, resting his hand on the knob. "I'd suggest you eat, Uzumaki-san. You won't get the antidote until you do, and you can never find your son if you're dead." The Snake sannin left, locking the door behind him.

Sarutobi peered at the infant before him. "Yes, he matches Kushina's description, and he's the right age." It was almost two months since the Kyuubi attack, and Sarutobi hadn't see or heard from Kushina for several weeks. Sarutobi had considered sending out shinobi to find her, but though no new disasters had occurred since the Kyuubi attack, all of the shinobi of Konoha were widely scattered, out on missions to try and raise money to finish repairs in the village and to reassure the fire daimyo that they could already handle missions and that he needn't send new missions to other villages instead. _Maybe if Kushina hasn't shown up in a few more weeks, I'll send someone to look for her,_ Sarutobi thought.

"What would you like done with the demon, Hokage-sama?" The ANBU who was holding Naruto asked.

Sarutobi looked up sharply. "First off, you can drop the 'demon' talk. Naruto is as much a hero as the Yondaime was in the defeat of the Kyuubi and will be treated as such. Secondly, I think the best thing would be to let Naruto live at the hospital for now. His mother shouldn't be away for too much longer, and then she can take him home."

As it happened, Sarutobi would end up having to send out that search party in a few weeks' time to find the missing red-haired kunoichi. But the party would return empty-handed, unable to find Kushina after a thorough search of the neighboring villages and the woodlands surrounding Konoha.

Unsure of what to do with Naruto, Sarutobi got him his own apartment when the boy was two years old. Sarutobi visited the boy faithfully every day and often stopped by and brought Naruto to the Hokage tower with him in the mornings. To keep the boy out of trouble, he ended up enrolling Naruto in the Shinobi academy two years early. He encouraged Naruto to be independent and to try and make friends with the older children in his classes as well as kids his own age.

Occasionally, over the years, Sarutobi would wonder what became of Kushina.

Six months after her initial imprisonment, Kushina was as stubborn as ever. Though she faithfully ate the food provided to her every day and even occasionally spoke, she utterly refused to say a word on any of the topics that so interested her captor.

Though Orochimaru visited several times a month, his visits became less frequent with every passing month as Kushina refused to speak on the subjects of her husband, her son, her sealing techniques, or Konoha. The most her usually got out of her were a few curt, sarcastic comments.

That's when Mizuki came up with a brilliant idea.

Mizuki was a recently acquired member of Orochimaru's organization. As a sensei at the Shinobi academy, Mizuki was well placed to be an inconspicuous information-gatherer. The perfect spy.

Mizuki's suggestion came in the form of a note, hand-delivered to Orochimaru by one of his subordinates who had been to a secret meeting with Mizuki to get the most recent update on the goings-on within Orochimaru's old village. The note took the form of a photograph, taken of the seven-month-old infant who so resembled his father. On the back of the envelope was written, in Mizuki's cramped hand- _For his mother's cooperation. _Delighted, Orochimaru hastened down to the cell in which Kushina reposed.

When the door opened, Kushina raised an eyebrow, it not being time for her next meal yet. She did not stand, but then, she never did for Orochimaru, preferring to remain seated with her back against the wall. "What is it you want?" She asked harshly.

"Ah, don't take that tone with me, Uzumaki-san! I bring good news! Don't you want to see?" Orochimaru said, holding up the photo so that all Kushina could see was the back.

"If you consider it good news, then no," was Kushina's terse reply.

"But this, I think, will interest you even more than it does me. You see, one of my agents has found your son."

Kushina bit her lip to stop herself from crying out. Orochimaru could see that her body was tensing, longing to spring up and snatch the photo from him, no doubt. Orochimaru laughed softly. "Oh no, don't get up on my account. Here you are, no strings attached." Orochimaru held out the photo and Kushina leaned forward and took it from his pale, long-fingered grip.

For a long moment Kushina's eyes played over the image, drinking it in. Orochimaru let her have her moment before her took the photo back. She resisted for a moment but then desisted, allowing him to pull the photo from her suddenly slack grip.

"Naruto," Kushina whispered, and Orochimaru thought that, for the first time since her imprisonment, the red-haired woman was about to cry. Suppressing his gloating grin, Orochimaru left immediately.

_Excellent. If this has the desired effect, it will prevent her from trying to stop taking her antidote for the sake of someday seeing her son. All the same, it may be a good idea to have Mizuki continue to send pictures of her son. Every few months should be enough, but not too regularly. If she's expecting it, there's no fun in it._

And so Orochimaru continued to visit Kushina, though the visits became much shorter and less frequent over the years. When Orochimaru joined Akatsuki, he left instructions for Kushina to be supplied with her daily antidote as per usual in his absence, though of course she wouldn't receive news of her son for the duration of the Snake sannin's allegiance to Akatsuki. And once Orochimaru returned, bent on making the perfect 'skin' to inhabit, he all but forgot about the red-haired kunoichi, though she was still being fed the correct antidote every day, the lab assistants' instructions on that point never having been revised. And thus Kushina was kept alive, tormented by the grief of watching her son grow up through captured stills of his life and the knowledge that she could not influence it.

Until one day.

Kushina lifted her head as she heard the scrape of a key in her lock. She adjusted the chains around her wrists so they would neither rattle nor scrape along the sore, flayed parts of her wrists. She frowned as a boy entered her a cell, a boy she had never seen before. He couldn't be more than fifteen years old, with mid-length silver hair and black eyes behind round glasses. He gave her a smile and she shivered involuntarily. It was the same sort of smile Orochimaru had always used to give her when he was about to deliver news about her son that he knew would make her want to break down and weep. The smile looked strangely out of place on the smooth face of this teenage boy.

The boy approached her, pulling a pair of chakra-dampening cuffs from a weapons pouch he wore. He snapped the cuffs around her wrists before unchaining her from the wall and firmly taking hold of the short chain that connected the two cuffs.

"Who are you, boy?" Kushina asked.

"Kabuto," the boy replied, leading Kushina from the room by her cuffs.

"And where are you taking me, boy?"

"Where my master wills you to go. To meet your son." Kushina stopped dead in her tracks, but Kabuto pulled her on with an impatient shake of the cuffs.

"Excuse me?"

"Orochimaru-sama delegated to me the task of explaining your guidelines to you. Orochimaru-sama wishes for you to teach Naruto sealing, but there are certain things you may not discuss with him. If you do not comply with my master's wishes- if you break the rules and bring up the wrong topic- we will kill Naruto. Slowly. Do you understand?"

"Naturally," Kushina said dryly, hiding her anxiety. "And I take it you'll be watching me every second I'm with my son, if it really is my son you're taking me to."

"Of course. Now, the rules. You are not to mention that you are the boy's mother. You are not to mention the Yondaime or anything at all pertaining to Konoha. Keep in mind, if you're not sure if it's against the rules, it is. Do not speak of the Kyuubi or of Jinchuriki. Do not mention Orochimaru's name. Do not remove materials from the room. Do not perform unauthorized jutsu. And lastly, do not attempt to get around to rules by passing notes or using code or methods of communication of any kind. You will be routinely searched after each lesson with the boy."

By this time the two of them had reached a plain door and Kabuto had removed one hand from Kushina's cuffs in order to unlock the door. He led Kushina into the large, brightly lit room and seated her in a plain, straight-backed wooden chair before the long table. He removed Kushina's handcuffs.

Kushina immediately felt the difference as she began to regain control of her chakra for the first time in years. True it was only the tiniest of trickles, and she knew she wouldn't be up to full capacity for quite some time, but it made her feel more at ease already. She rubbed her chaffed wrists, speaking to cover her elation. "With all these rules, I feel like I'm back at the academy. 'Put everything away when you're finished.' 'No talking while sensei is talking.' 'Wait your turn and share.' 'No cursing.' Of course, it was always that last one I had the most trouble following."

Kabuto chuckled. "Now I see where Naruto gets it," he said.

Kushina snorted. "About this 'Naruto' I'm supposed to be teaching; well I bet we're not thinking of the same boy. There's no way any son of mine would end up here. Not with the people watching over him that he's got."

"Oh, you'd be surprised. In fact, Naruto came quite willingly."

Kushina couldn't help but feel a deep sense of frustrated regret at those words. As hard as she had been trying to keep from getting her hopes up, she had really and truly thought, for just a moment, that there was a chance that she was about to see her son. Of course, that would mean Orochimaru had control of him, but if it really was Kushina's Naruto, she was confident that she could work out a way to free both her and him if need be. But if this boy of whom Kabuto was speaking had come willingly… "In that case, it definitely isn't my Naruto," Kushina said firmly.

"We'll see," was Kabuto's only answer. "I'm going to go and retrieve him now. Please bear in mind that you will be monitored in here at all times, even in my absence, and that any attempt by you to break any of the aforementioned rules will result in your son being hurt." Kabuto left, locking the door behind him with a resounding click.

Kushina sat up straight in the chair and looked around, carefully not looking at the tinted two-way sheet of mirrored glass set into the far wall opposite the door and taking stock of the materials that she was being provided for the task of teaching about seals. Not that she actually planned to teach any lackey of Orochimaru's about the true mysteries of quality seals, but if she was going to fake it convincingly, it was a good idea to know what she was going to be using.

The supplies with which the room was stocked met her grudging approval. There were different colors of inks and brushes and even different types of paper and a few blunted practice weapons. The low bookshelves by the wall were crammed with texts, manuals, and scrolls and there were even a few pieces of colored chalk, presumably for drawing on the whitish plasticine floor tiles or for demonstrating how seals could be applied to the body.

_Hmm. Even if they do frisk me every time I leave the room, it should still be possible for me to smuggle out enough materials over a long period of time to make a seal to get me out of my cell, depending, of course, how often I'm brought to this room. I could make an exploding seal to blast the door open, but that might not be enough to get past any guards I encounter or to leave the labs entirely. How about a seal that feeds on the chakra that composes the dampening seals in the walls of my cell? That could work. Or a variation; a sort of parasite seal that piggybacks on the chakra-dampening seals that will feed me back any chakra that the chakra-dampening seals siphon off for as long as I'm in the room. Either one of those ideas would allow me to regain my chakra over a short period of time, maybe a matter of days, and from there it would be simple for me to fight my way out. I'll have to work on designing the seals, but that can wait until I'm back in my cell and not being monitored around the clock. Oh, Orochimaru, you think you've got me beaten and cornered, but this situation is just asking to be exploited._

_When I leave, I'd have to deal with the squatter poison in my system, but that shouldn't be too hard if I have the proper materials. A seal that combines properties of both vacuum and storage seals could gather the poison into one part of my body. True, that might weaken the part in which it's gathered, but using the right medical jutsu with a fuinjutsu spin on it, the seal can be removed, taking the poison sealed inside with it. Of course, to design the seal to attract the poison in the first place, I'd need a sample of the specific type of poison. I guess the solution to that lies in the antidote that Orochimaru's lackeys dose me with every day. If I can seal up a bit of each type of food that they give me for a day, one of the items is sure to have the antidote in it which, once analyzed, will tell me what poison I need to create the vacuum seal for._

For the first time in years, Kushina was thinking like her old, optimistic self; a person whose determination knew no bounds and who was a genius at designing seals. However, her conscious gave her no peace. _What of this Naruto boy I'm supposed to teach? Should I plan to break him out too? _Kushina shook her head a little. _He's not my Naruto. He volunteered to work for Orochimaru. Breaking him out would be a completely unnecessary risk. I would do it in a heartbeat if he actually was my son, but since he's not…_

Just then Kushina heard the key slide into the lock and the sharp clunk as the lock turned over. The door opened and a boy stepped through, looking over his shoulder enquiringly. From outside the door Kushina heard Kabuto's voice, though she couldn't make out the words. Then the door was swung closed behind the boy who had entered, leaving Kabuto on the outside. The boy turned. His eyes swept the room before coming to rest on Kushina's face. Violet locked onto bright blue.

Kushina felt the blood drain from her face and knew she was staring at the poor boy, but she couldn't help it. _You really do look like your father, Naruto- blonde hair, blue eyes and all. That settles it; we're both getting out of here just as soon as I can finish that seal._


	4. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Naruto gave the woman a tentative smile. "Hello. Kabuto said you would be teaching me some kind of new jutsu." Naruto took a step forward, then another, wishing the woman would stop staring at him and say something. The bright violet eyes in the gaunt, pale face were more than a little unnerving. He took a seat in the chair opposite her. She remained silent.

"What should I call you?" Naruto ventured.

After a minute or so, during which she didn't so much as acknowledge the question, the woman cleared her throat and spoke. "Your name is Naruto, isn't it?"

"Uh, yes, and you are?" Naruto asked, squirming in his seat under her intense scrutiny.

"My name is Kushina, but-" here she flicked a nervous look at the tinted mirror set into the wall before a sort of determination seemed to steal over her features. "But you can call me Kaa-chan," she finished firmly.

Naruto raised his eyebrows in surprise, his smile returning to his face. "You can't be that bad, then," he said. "I've never had a mother, but I guess I could give it a try… Kaa-sensei."

Kushina smiled a little for the first time and seemed settled into her chair, a bit more relaxed and at ease than she had seemed previously. "You'd be what- ten years old, Naruto?"

"Yep! I'm going to be the youngest Hokage yet! One to surpass the previous four!" Naruto declared happily.

Kushina beamed, working hard not to let her sadness and pain show on her face. Once she was sure that her voice would be steady, she said, "Well, if that's so, you'll need to learn about fuinjutsu. Don't you think a Hokage should know about seals, Naruto?"

Naruto shrugged. "Probably. It sounds useful, though I've only come across it in the books Kabuto gave me as a passing mention. Is that what you're going to teach me?"

"Yes. We ought to start today and make the most out of our time together. If you're going to be the youngest Hokage yet, you'll have to learn as much as you can!" Kushina said enthusiastically, standing up and taking a step toward the table that was loaded with supplies.

"Yeah!" Naruto stood up and followed her, watching carefully as she chose paper and pens from among the selection. She handed him the same as what she took and they both sat down again.

Kushina seemed to hesitate, frowning at the paper under her hands a bit. "What kind of seal will you teach me first?" Naruto prompted.

"Yes, of course," Kushina said quickly. "Let's think. How about-" she glanced toward the tinted mirror once more, but this time Naruto noticed that there was a sly, mischievous tilt to her smile and an almost vindictive look in her eyes, "-exploding seals?"

"Sounds good to me," Naruto said, picking up his pen.

"Hang on," Kushina said. "First thing's first. Have you learned to channel chakra into objects yet?" Naruto shook his head. "Well, no help for that. You'll just have to learn as we go," she said briskly.

Kushina began to trace symbols on her paper, explaining what each one was called and what it was used for. Occasionally she would draw several symbols or kanji interlocking and describe how the purpose of each affected the others when they were arranged together. Finally, when she had traced out every one of the relatively few symbols necessary for making an exploding tag and given Naruto a thorough grounding on how each worked when chakra was applied, she started expounding on how different amounts or different types of chakra would effect the seal while it was being made.

Pausing only for breath, Kushina went on, asking Naruto detailed questions and having him answer back to her what she had said, just to make sure he had been listening. She was pleased to discover that he seemed fascinated by the subject and was, for the most part, able to repeat things perfectly to the word after hearing them only once. He seemed to have an instinctive knack, posing question after question, proposing combinations, variations, and possible applications for various types of seals he had heard of before. Kushina could see that it wouldn't be long before Naruto was designing his own seals for shinobi or everyday uses.

Naruto could easily have felt overwhelmed by the flood of information, but the boy seemed to drink it up, fitting each new data point into his constantly expanding map of the shinobi world with ease. Soon, he was not only proposing uses for certain seals, but was thinking of ways to combine seals with other jutsu, either while the seals were being made or while they were being used. Kushina was just the kind of sensei he needed. She answered every one of his questions instantly and in such detail that he always got more information than he had been seeking. When Naruto seemed uncertain on a point, Kushina could always find a way to make him understand.

Finally, Kushina instructed Naruto to begin tracing out the symbols and seeing where they could fit together. As he complied, Kushina described as best she could how one went about channeling chakra into a seal as it was crafted. Naruto nodded, he understood just fine. It was the application that was the tricky part.

Naruto was rather pleased when he found that his chakra control had improved vastly since Kabuto had begun teaching him. He was also a bit confused, as he hadn't been aware that his chakra control had improved quite to the level it had. In any case, he found it a bit hard to both channel his chakra and form the kanji correctly. He was also having a bit of trouble channeling the chakra _into_ the letters as he penned them, as Kushina-sensei had described. He could picture what was supposed to happen all right, but he couldn't make it work the first few times. However, when Kushina suggested he take a break, he refused, insisting he would get the hang of it.

Eventually, he did. It was only twenty minutes or so since he had first tried and the table before him was littered with papers, each one coated, sometimes on both sides, by symbols, some sprawling or cramped, some single or in interlocking groups. In addition to this, some of the pages bore notes about seals or aspects of same that Naruto wanted to experiment with. An idea would have occurred to him and he wrote it down at once so he could think about it later and not be distracted from the task at hand.

When Kushina picked up a few of the sheets lying scattered on the table, she noticed the notes on exploding seals. The ideas there were genius for someone who had only begun to learn about seals a few hours ago. He had notes on controlling the blast radius of an explosion and on delayed explosions.

Naruto's first successful exploding seal was a small one drawn in the corner of an already full page. He had really been concentrating while he had crafted it, visualizing the chakra imbuing the ink and activating the purpose of the various signs and symbols. When the seal was completed, the last line drawn, Naruto got a peculiar feeling, a sense of completion and satisfaction.

"Hey! I think I did it!" he exclaimed.

Kushina picked up the sheet, examining the seal minutely. "Looks good to me," she said. "And the chakra in it feels alright, too. Want to test it?"

"Yes I do." Naruto took the page back from Kushina and carefully tore the paper around the one successful seal, making sure not to rip through any of the lines. Then he placed it on the floor.

"Do you remember how I showed you to set it off?" Kushina asked.

Naruto laughed. "How could I forget?"

"And thus the pyromaniac was born," Kushina said wryly.

"What?"

"Never mind." Kushina watched Naruto as he positioned the tag so it was far enough away from the tables and walls of the room for his standards. Which meant that something was probably going to catch fire if Kushina didn't step in. As the red-haired woman moved forward and shifted the tag farther away from the supply table, she noticed just how excited and jittery Naruto was. "I'm surprised you managed to stay still for long enough to make an exploding tag in one sitting," she commented.

"Yeah," Naruto said. "Actually, so am I, a little. Before I came here, there's no way I could have either sat still for that long or controlled my chakra well enough to have made a seal. It's probably a combination of Kabuto's help and the fact that sealing is actually really interesting."

Kushina didn't say anything for a moment, but she also didn't move, meaning that Naruto couldn't activate the seal, as she was sitting so close to it still. Suddenly, she asked, "How did you come to be here, Naruto?"

Naruto scratched the back of his head, slightly embarrassed. "Well, I was in my last year at the shinobi academy and about a month ago or so, but I failed the genin exam. I would have had to retake the whole year of classes, but one of my senseis offered for me to come here and get private training instead. So I accepted and Kabuto's been teaching me since then."

Kushina stood up and retreated from the seal on the floor, drawing Naruto back with her. "Okay, Naruto. Let's see what you've really learned. Go ahead and blow it up."

"With pleasure." Naruto formed a single handseal, channeling chakra as he did so.

The seal blew up, the paper engulfed in an enormous ball of flame, the force of which rattled the tinted window in the wall and made Naruto's ears ring faintly. When the smoke and flames finally cleared, Kushina clapped him on the shoulder.

"Congratulations. It works!"

Naruto stared at the large scorch mark on the floor, spreading from the point where the paper had been like a smoky flower or many-pointed star. "Kabuto's going to kill us," he groaned.

"Probably," Kushina shrugged, "But my impression was that that boy has way too large of a pole up his ass for someone so young. He'll deal."

Naruto let out an incredulous laugh.

"Well, how does Kabuto act around you?" Kushina asked half challengingly, half curiously.

Naruto sobered somewhat. "He's a pretty good teacher," Naruto admitted. "He just gets impatient sometimes. Though, when he does, it usually forces him to come up with a faster way to teach me, which seems to work better than more traditional methods. Apart from that… well, I think he used to see me as more of a liability, but recently, for the past few weeks, he's been treating me more like a student. But even so, every once in a while we'll be getting along fine and then he'll mention his master and he'll kind of close up. He won't answer my questions and usually he leaves soon after."

Kushina bit her lip at the mention of Orochimaru, a forbidden topic, according to Kabuto. "Do you know his master's name?" she asked, testing.

"No. He always refuses to tell me," Naruto said, shaking his head.

"Did Kabuto give you a reason why he or his master wants to train you?" Kushina asked.

Naruto opened his mouth to respond, but just then Kabuto entered, leaving the door open behind him. "Naruto," he said. The blonde boy turned and saw Kabuto and shut his mouth hastily. "Kushina, you have concluded his lesson for today, I think. You've done well. From now on you two will be meeting for lessons once or twice a week. Come Naruto. I'll escort you to your room and then come back for you, Kushina." As Naruto left the room, he gave Kushina one last wave and a slightly guilty smile.

Kushina waved back. Kabuto, who had hung back to hold the door open for Naruto, gave her a long, blank look through the lenses of his glasses before he left, locking the door behind him once more.

Once Naruto was safely ensconced in his room once more, he began to pace, turning over in his head all the new things he had learned, muttering new ideas aloud as they occurred. After about ten minutes, he went over to the tinted mirror and rapped on it sharply. "Hey! Are you guys taking notes? Because unless I get a desk and some paper and things, I won't be able to remember all of this stuff."

No one responded to Naruto's voice. No one came to unlock his door. He shrugged. It had been worth a shot.

When Kabuto finally came with Naruto's dinner, he found the boy feverishly leafing through one of his books in search of a mention of seals he remembered reading about. When Naruto heard the older boy arrive, he abandoned the task, preoccupied instead with requesting a desk, reference books on sealing, and some other note-taking supplies.

Kabuto promised nothing, saying he would see what he could do and suggesting that Naruto read his assigned passage from the book Kabuto had just brought with the food.

Once Kabuto had left, Naruto resumed pacing, but found himself unable to fully concentrate. Instead, he gave up and devoured the food Kabuto had brought before turning his attention to the new book. It was on basic jutsu and chakra control, as well as having a little piece on the history of Sunagakure, where many famous puppet masters were said to originate.

Naruto, though he by no means forgot about the newfound world of fuinjutsu, settled down to read late into the night, becoming thoroughly engrossed in the book.

The next day, when Kabuto fetched Naruto he brought him to a room not unlike those that the two normally occupied for training purposes, except for the fact that low table occupied the center of the room and there were a few chairs pushed up against the walls. On the table were two wooden jointed mannequins, each no larger than six inches high. At Kabuto's instruction, Naruto got a chair and dragged it over to the table, sitting down and drawing the seat closer to the low table.

"Now, did you read the passage I assigned you last night, Naruto?" Kabuto asked.

Naruto nodded, neglecting to mention that he had read almost the entire book the night before, staying up until the early hours of the morning. To his surprise and pleasure the reading had gone fairly quickly and he had barely had to refer to the lexicon at all.

"Good," Kabuto said. He picked up the wooden mannequins, handing one to Naruto. "Can you guess what we'll be doing today?"

Naruto shook his head, perplexed. "You said you would start teaching me clones and kawirimi and things," he said, trying to keep an accusatory, petulant note out of his voice.

"And so I will, but not just yet. Later today I plan to start those things. You will continue your jutsu studies and physical training at the same time as you'll be doing this. No, what I'm trying to teach you is puppetry."

"You know, these little things wouldn't do that much in a fight," Naruto commented dryly, holding up his own little mannequin.

"That is of no significance presently," Kabuto said stiffly. "The point of these is to train you to form chakra threads and use them to manipulate a puppet. Once you have mastered that, we will move on to higher forms of puppetry."

Naruto nodded, showing that he understood. "Can _you_ form chakra threads and all that?" he asked.

Kabuto pushed his glasses up higher on his nose. "I am able, certainly, though I am not a puppet master. However, my knowledge should be sufficient to teach you what you need to know."

"Alright then. What's first?" Kabuto began to describe to Naruto how to stretch small quantities of his chakra out until they were as long and thin as threads, though much stronger. He also indicated that these things, with experience, could be performed quickly enough that chakra strings could be shortened or lengthened as needed during battle. Finally, he demonstrated how to latch the chakra strings onto different segments of the mannequin's body and twitch and manipulate each string to make the mannequin walk and fight.

It all seemed absurdly simple to Naruto, who had a suspicion that there was an awful lot Kabuto was leaving out of his explanation. "Is that it? It that all there is to puppetry?" he asked when Kabuto had finished.

"Of course not. This is no more than the surface; only the things you need to know to control that little wooden puppet. Once you've mastered that, I'll give you more information to accommodate teaching you the next step."

"How many steps are there?" Naruto asked, watching as Kabuto put his own puppet through a complicated series of offensive and defensive moves, dodging and slashing and wheeling and blocking.

"Enough to keep us going for some time." Kabuto said grimly. "To that end, I suggest you make a start. In a few hours, we'll put this to rest for now and I'll begin teaching you about clones."

As Naruto had expected, forming the chakra threads in the way that Kabuto had described didn't prove especially challenging; nor did attaching them to the various joints and segments of the mannequin. The part that gave him really trouble was coordinating the movements of his fingers with how he wanted the little puppet to move. He would often forget which finger controlled which body part or twitch the wrong finger by accident. It was boring, fiddly work and his mind wandered quite a lot as he tried to make the puppet obey his wishes.

In the end, Kabuto seemed to see that Naruto wasn't going to make any more progress than he already had that day and called an early halt to the proceedings.

Naruto helped the older boy push the table and chairs against the wall, leaving a larger space clear for clone making.

Before they started anything, Kabuto, as was his custom, made Naruto recite to him all that he had learned about clones in the academy. After that, Kabuto stayed silent for a minute, thinking hard. As last, he spoke again.

"Okay. Well, it seems like there's not much for me to teach you except to say that your chakra control seems to be where you were lacking the most in the academy. I'd suggest you try to make a clone the way you always did then so I can see how I need to help you."

Naruto raised his hands and placed them together in a seal. "You want me to make two clones, like I always had to do in the academy?" he inquired.

"No, I think one should be fine for now. Once you've got that, it will be easy to make multiple clones," Kabuto said decisively.

Naruto shrugged. "Whatever you say. Here goes. Bunshin No Jutsu!"

There was a puff of smoke. Naruto lowered his hands, waiting to see the result. He knew it would be better than what he had been able to produce in the academy, at least based on chakra control, if nothing else. What he did not expect was, when the smoke cleared, to see a pair of blue eyes at exactly his eye-level, the smoke drifting through them, though they looked more solid than any illusion he had ever seen. Surrounding the eyes was his familiar face, whiskered, blonde-haired and healthy-looking. The clone was identical to him in every way, his height, his build, even wearing the same clothes as he wore- the ones Kabuto had given him the day before- and the same ninja sandals.

Naruto walked around it, bemused, taking in every detail of the clone. He had expected it to be good, but not _that_ good.

"It seems there's nothing for me to teach you." Naruto swiveled around to look at Kabuto. From his tone of voice, Naruto would have sworn he was grinning smugly, but by the time Naruto saw his face it was blank, wiped of expression.

"What now, then? What's next? Kawirimi?" Naruto asked, excited by the prospect of progress he could never have dreamed of back in the academy. Not that Iruka and Mizuki had been bad teachers- Iruka in particular had always been kind to Naruto- they just hadn't had the spare time to slow things down for him and give him the attention he needed.

"No, I think I'll save that for tomorrow, after you've had more practice with puppetry. Now, I think, is an appropriate time for you to work on your aim." A gleam of anticipation crept into his eye. "And your dodging."

Naruto groaned.

When Naruto finally returned to his room that night, limping a little, carrying a book on sealing that Kabuto had procured for him and swearing under his breath, it was to find a surprise. Apparently, while he had been getting his ass kicked by Kabuto during physical training, the older boy had requested that Naruto receive a desk and swiveling chair for his room. It was a bit small, but then, so was he room. On the desk was a ream of paper and a package of pens and pencils and a kneaded eraser.

Dropping the book on his bed, Naruto headed over to investigate. On top of the paper there was a note from Kabuto reminding Naruto that he would be unable to perform jutsu or channel chakra into any seals he made while in his room. To express his feelings, Naruto crumpled up the paper and shoved it into a drawer of the desk. He wished he had the notes he had made during his first lesson with Kushina.

He set to work, first scribbling down all the ideas he had had the day before, as well as a few new ones that came to him as he wrote. Then he took a new sheet and wrote down everything he could remember Kushina telling him about sealing, placing question marks after statements that he wasn't sure applied in only some circumstances or to all seals in general.

When he was satisfied, he gathered up the papers he had written on and checked them over, reviewing the notes in his spiky, scrawling, though perfectly legible, handwriting.

After that, he at last settled down on his bed, not longer aching from the thrashing Kabuto had given him, to peruse the book. Every once in a while he would get up and cross to his new desk, bringing the book with him, to copy something down or propose and experiment for future testing or write down a new idea.

Once again, he didn't get to sleep until early the next morning.

Kabuto removed his glasses, rubbing his prickling eyes. He wished that the next shift assigned to watch Naruto sleep might show some initiative and arrive on time for once. _Why does Orochimaru-sama insist that we watch him around the clock, anyway? It's not like he knows enough to break out yet. I mean, not even his mother has a twenty four/guard, and she's ANBU level._

Suddenly,Kabuto heard the creak of someone outside of the door and the scrape of a key in the lock of the observation room. _About time,_ he thought grimly. He rose to leave, settling his glasses back into their usual resting place on the bridge of his nose as he did so.

"Oh no, don't leave on my account, Kabuto. Stay awhile." Kabuto froze at the sound of that voice, instantly composing his face into a mask servility.

He sat down once more, suppressing a sigh. "Good evening, Orochimaru-sama," he said.

The pale snake Sannin drew up the chair opposite Kabuto's, his amber, slit-pupiled eyes penetrating through the lenses of Kabuto's glasses and locking on to his tired black eyes, not giving permission for the younger man to back down or look away.

"Actually," Orochimaru said pleasantly, "I believe it to be morning at this point. You really ought to get more rest, Kabuto. It doesn't do for a boy your age to stay up so late."

"Yes, Orochimaru-sama," Kabuto said, while inside he cursed the old hypocrite. Orochimaru knew perfectly well that Kabuto would have spent all day with Naruto, and yet he went and assigned the silver-haired boy the early shift…

Kabuto adjusted his glasses to hide his annoyance.

"To cut straight to the point, Kabuto, I have already read that report you submitted a few hours ago and wanted to come down here and hear the facts straight from you. You say the Puppet-master's DNA is already beginning to take effect?"

"I believe that to be correct, Orochimaru-sama," Kabuto said, leaning forward eagerly. "Naruto showed considerable development in the areas of strategizing, literacy, planning, creativity, and the like. In addition, he grasped the concept of chakra strings and puppetry with a bare minimum of instruction from me and was able to create a perfect clone on the first try where before that, Mizuki tells me, he could not even come close. In my opinion, all of these things are benefits of the Puppet-master's DNA and, if you require it, I may even be able to prove it if I try plotting this increase in intelligence, competence, and proficiency from before the injection onwards-" but here Orochimaru held up a hand and Kabuto fell silent.

"That will not be necessary, Kabuto, though I admire your enthusiasm. Your word is sufficient for me." Kabuto nodded, betraying no emotions. "Why don't you tell me about Naruto's sealing, instead?" Orochimaru suggested.

"Much as we had predicted, the boy shows and instinctive grasp of sealing," Kabuto said.

"Well, he's got it on both sides, even without Sasori's DNA," Orochimaru pointed out. "Please continue."

"Most of his ideas show innovation and insight such that when the time comes, I believe he will have no trouble applying his knowledge of seals to the creation of puppets," Kabuto said.

"Is that so? Excellent," Orochimaru said. "Well, as usual, Kabuto, your progress with the boy seems perfectly satisfactory. Keep up the good work and all that and I'll- yes? There was something else you wanted to say?"

Kabuto had cleared his throat meaningfully. "As a matter of fact, there is, Orochimaru-sama."

"Well spit out this 'matter of fact,' as I'm sure you'd like to get to bed soon."

Kabuto spoke quickly but steadily, as though wanting to get the words out before he lost his nerve, important as they were. "Not that I wish to question the advisability of teaching the boy sealing," he said, choosing his words carefully, "But I feel it is my duty to remind you that in the course of his fuinjutsu studies, it may be difficult to prevent Naruto from discovering the powers he gained from the DNA of the Paper mistress. After all, neither he nor Kushina is yet aware of the experiments that are being performed on him, and inadvertent discovery could be… troublesome, to say the least."

"You bring up a valid concern," Orochimaru admitted. "However, I would not have put you in charge of this project if I did not believe you capable of dealing with things like this, Kabuto. I'll leave this matter in your hands. I'm sure you can come up with a way of dealing with it discretely."

"Yes, Orochimaru-sama."

(One month ago, the day after Naruto's abduction)

Sarutobi sat in his office. To any onlooker, it would seem that he was heavily ensconced in his paperwork, reading over the thick packet before him with attentive single-mindedness. But they would have been wrong.

On that day, more than any other, Sarutobi's mind was even farther from the task at hand than usual. The day before, Iruka had informed him of Naruto's failure to perform the jutsu necessary to be declared a genin.

Not that Sarutobi was altogether surprised, Naruto being two years younger than all of his classmates. Sometimes the Sandiame wondered if he had done the right thing in pushing Naruto into the academy so early. But these were not the things that distracted the old man from getting on with his workload this time.

No, it was the fact that Naruto had not come to see him since before he left for the academy the day before. Sarutobi had a nagging feeling that something was amiss, a feeling he knew it would not be wise to ignore. However, he found it hard to justify taking time off to look for Naruto. The boy often went off on his own, occasionally disappearing for days at a time, and Sarutobi couldn't just take off after him every time.

The only reason that Sarutobi could see that would make this absence more sinister than any other time was the fact that it directly followed what was no doubt a huge emotional blow for Naruto: failing to achieve the required results to become a genin.

Sarutobi sighed, rubbing his eyes with his forefinger and thumb. Why was he suddenly reminded of that time, ten years ago, when Kushina had stormed into his office, demanding that he send a search party out to locate her son?

There was a tactful knock at the door. Sarutobi all but jumped, but was almost immediately reassured. _It can't be Kushina. That knock was far too polite for her._

"Come in," he called. It could be important, he reasoned. His paperwork could wait.

The door was pushed open and someone slipped inside. Sarutobi, who had been expecting an ANBU, was slightly surprised, though he recovered his composure well. The man had dark eyes and mid-length silver hair, around which he tied black bandana with his hitai-ate attached to the front.

"Ah, Mizuki-san," Sarutobi greeted him. "You wanted a word?"

"Yes, Hokage-sama." Mizuki approached the desk, better to see the Sandiame over the piles of papers. "It's about Naruto Uzumaki."

Sarutobi sat up in his chair. His voice was tense and he gripped the edge of the desk. "You have news of him? Mizuki-san, what has happened to Naruto?"

"Merely that Kushina arrived in Konoha last night. She took Naruto with her, bidding me tell you that they were leaving, as she was displeased at Naruto's treatment at the hands of the villagers while he lived in Konoha."

Sarutobi frowned a little. "She left without coming to see me?"

"Apparently so, Hokage-sama. She merely entrusted me with the message as I was the closest shinobi to her who was out on the streets at that hour."

"That doesn't sound like Kushina," Sarutobi mused.

"No, Hokage-sama?"

"Well, if she was angry about how the villagers treated Naruto, I would have expected her to come bursting in here, complaining about it."

"Ah, yes. She thought you'd say that. She admitted that, given her own way, she would have come marching up here to perform deeds such as the type that would make the council slap a death sentence on her head."

"Your words, I presume?"

"Mostly, Hokage-sama. I edited it somewhat for content."

"I wonder why she _didn't_ come marching up here, though," Sarutobi persisted.

"One can only assume that she was concerned about her son's wellbeing in that scenario," Mizuki pointed out.

"In that case, where has the woman been for the last ten years of Naruto's life? Did she say?" Sarutobi asked indignantly.

"She did not, Hokage-sama, nor did she say where she was taking Naruto. However, she did say that she might get in contact with you at her earliest convenience. Or when she stopped being so angry."

"I may have a while to wait then," Sarutobi sighed. "Ah well. Can't be helped, I suppose. At least I know that Naruto is safe."

"Yes, Hokage-sama."

"Well, if you'll excuse me Mizuki, as hard as I pray, this paperwork isn't going to do itself."

"Of course, Hokage-sama." Mizuki made his exit.

(Present-day, Orochimaru's study)

Orochimaru idly leafed through Naruto's file. Though the boy had only been staying in the labs for a little over a month, his file was already sizeable, and Kabuto added new information and updates to it practically every day.

_I wasn't wrong when I called Kabuto enthusiastic,_ Orochimaru reflected. However, he also believed that he had been right to choose Kabuto to head the project. Despite his youth and relative inexperience, Kabuto was skilled, thorough, methodical. _Just the kind of subordinate I could use more of around here,_ Orochimaru reflected.

In fact, though he would never dream of enlightening Kabuto to the fact, Orochimaru was rather relieved that he had not had to sacrifice Kabuto to the DNA project. Doing so would have been something of a waste, in his opinion, not that it would have prevented him from going ahead an injecting Kabuto anyway.

_At least this way, if the Uzumaki boy is consistent in his resilience to the DNA, when I possess his body I will have someone competent at my right-hand side._

Now, Orochimaru's thoughts turned to the Uzumaki boy himself. Under Kabuto's tutelage the boy was shaping up to be as powerful as, if not more so than, Kabuto himself. If it weren't for the fact that nobody had yet survived the experiment, Orochimaru may have even considered_not_ possessing Naruto's body. _With all that power, he might yet make the perfect, loyal subordinate. If it weren't for his troublesome Konohagakure morals, I would even have hoped that he would come around to my way of thinking in a few years. But no, it's better this way. He will gain the powers and serve me in the best way possible: by becoming my new skin._

Orochimaru flipped through to the front of Naruto's file folder. There were the predictions that Kabuto had made at the beginning of the experiment. Of course, every time Orochimaru decided that it was time for Naruto to be given a new ability, he would have Kabuto write a whole new set of conjectures about how the new ability would interact with those Naruto had already been given.

Kushina looked up at the scrape of the lock. It wasn't the time that someone usually came with food for her, so it must be Orochimaru, after something from her as ever.

She got a surprise when a figure entered and it was not the snake Sannin, but the silver-haired boy, Kabuto. It had been a few days since she had seen him last, since she had given Naruto his first lesson on sealing. She treated him to the same silence she always gave Orochimaru when he came to see her and did not rise. After a moment, the boy sat down to be on her eye-level.

"Hello, Uzumaki-san," Kabuto said coolly.

"Hello, boot-licking scum," Kushina responded, imitating Kabuto's cool, precise voice.

To his credit, Kabuto seemed unfazed. "You may be wondering why I'm down here, Uzumaki-san.'

"Nothing of the sort, Kabuto."

Kabuto blinked slowly, the only indication he gave that her familiarity was unwelcome.

"Ooh, you're _good._ Most of the other guards would be furious by now," Kushina said casually.

"I am not a guard, Uzumaki-san."

"You're right, you're too good to be a guard. You must be one of the higher-ups. One of the ones who kiss Orochimaru's ass _directly,_ as opposed to through a low position in the hierarchy," Kushina said, smirking.

"You must feel fairly secure in your wellbeing, Uzumaki-san, as well as the wellbeing of your son." Kabuto gave a nasty smile. "I take it you believe me now that he _is_ your son?"

"Maybe, maybe not," Kushina said, tilting her head first to one side, then the other. "But, getting back to your other point, yeah, I think both of us are pretty secure. You wouldn't put a month of training into that kid just to kill him or risk damaging him in some unstable experiment."

"But what about you?" Kabuto persisted, "Are you, perhaps, expendable?"

"Oh I _know_ I am, Kabuto. But at least for now, I'm pretty safe. You want me to teach Naruto, and at the rate of one or two lessons a week, I'd say I've got a few months before you realize I'm not going to teach him any secrets you could exploit. I figure then you'll probably just stop feeding me the antidote to the squatter poison in my system and let that do its work quickly and quietly, probably in some sound-proof cell." Kushina spoke with remarkable nonchalance, as though she was discussing nothing more than the new price of shinobi weaponry.

Kabuto pushed his glasses up higher on his nose and opened his mouth to speak, but Kushina swiftly cut him off.

"I'll bet you're lousy at poker."

"How do you figure?" Kabuto asked, his train of thought momentarily derailed.

"The way you push you glasses up, I guessing that's your tell," Kushina said confidently.

Kabuto gave a thin smile. "I wouldn't know, Uzumaki-san, I don't gamble."

Kushina snorted. "I'll just bet you don't. If you didn't, you wouldn't be here, throwing your lot in with Orochimaru, would you? Why are you really here? Because I'd bet money it's not for the babysitting experience. And don't give me that whole, 'I am here to do exactly as my master requires,' crap."

Kabuto was silent for a moment. "I can see how you achieved your ANBU status, Uzumaki-san," Kabuto said at last.

"Why thank you, Kabuto. Though you know, sucking up to sensei doesn't get you a better grade in my class. Whether you're here out of loyalty to Orochimaru or loyalty to someone else, your still one of the old snake's lackeys, and, as such, will feel the full wrath of my scorching sarcasm."

"I expected nothing less of you, Uzumaki-san."

"Good boy. Now, why the hell are you slumming down here with the inmates? As fun as it is to trade insults with you, I bet your going to be in trouble with the big man himself if you don't deliver some trifling message or warning or other, and, no offence, but the sooner you leave, the sooner I can back to trying to escape from these handcuffs."

Kabuto made a mental note to post extra guards outside of Kushina's door.

_Shit. I'll bet he's just made a mental note to change my handcuffs or post more guards or something. Damn lackeys can't take a joke…_

Kabuto cleared his throat. "As it happens, I just wanted to congratulate you. You seemed to have lit quite the inspirational fire in your son. He seems completely obsessed with sealing now, to be frank."

"Well, what did he expect? If he's my son, he's a Namikaze on one side and an Uzumaki on the other. Sealing's in his blood, almost literally, thanks to the Kyuubi."

"Yes, quite." Kabuto stood, preparing to leave. "Just do not forget your boundaries. If you take a single step out of line, both you and he will be punished."

_Ooh, a trifling message _and_ a warning! I called it! _Kushina saluted with her bound hands. "Roger."

"Good." Kabuto opened to door, smiling at Kushina as he left. "Have a pleasant rest of the day, Uzumaki-san. Good luck with those handcuffs."

Over the course of the next few weeks, Naruto's abilities rapidly improved. When Kabuto taught Naruto kawirimi, the blonde boy thoroughly annoyed the silver-haired one by using it and dodging most of his attacks during physical training. It got to such an extent that Kabuto was forced to ban Naruto from using it during training.

"I understand that you are proud that you achieved it, and I'm impressed that you can use it so often without feeling the drain, but it defeats the purpose of the training if you are not considering other options of blocking or dodging. What if you were almost out of chakra? What then? You have to train for that eventuality, Naruto."

"Whatever, you just want your human target back," Naruto said, earning himself a blow to the ribs.

In addition to Kawirimi, Kabuto also taught Naruto henge, with some mixed results. Kabuto was only halfway through his explanation of the jutsu when Naruto took it upon himself to test it. What he ended up with was not only a perfect henge of Kabuto, but a perfect_transformation,_ the difference being that Naruto's henge was a solid clone of his sensei, rather than the illusion that most henges really are. After discovering this, Kabuto made Naruto perform the transformation several times, just to make sure it wasn't a one-time thing and that Naruto could repeat it if need be.

Then he made Naruto learn how to do it the right way.

Naruto couldn't really find a place to apply this jutsu to his spars with Kabuto, although that didn't stop him trying. For a week or so after he learned the jutsu, Kabuto would occasionally find himself sparring with the third Hokage, himself, Mizuki, or a large bowl of ramen, respectively. Finally, he told Naruto to knock it off.

Once Naruto knew all of the three basic jutsu, Kabuto set about teaching him to perform them seal-less and smoke-less, a task that took no more than a few weeks. Much harder were the puppetry studies that Naruto was undertaking at the same time. It took him quite some time to master the coordination needed to control the tiny mannequin, and privately thought that he would have even more difficulty once Kabuto started him using life-size battle-puppets.

However, he did eventually get the hang of it, and he spent several long hours practicing various taijutsu styles with it, just for Kabuto suggest that their mannequins fight it out, for fun. Naruto should have known better by then than to agree.

As he was morbidly gathering up the pieces of his little wooden puppet, Kabuto seemed to take pity on him. Telling Naruto to leave the pieces, he led him over to a table on which there was a deep tray. Kabuto took hold of the tray and spread its contents out on the table. The things were various segments and joints of a wooden puppet larger than the ones Naruto and Kabuto had been using, perhaps twelve inches high when it was all in one piece.

Kabuto instructed Naruto to refer to his knowledge of human anatomy and of puppets and put the mannequin back together. Sighing, Naruto set to work on the three-dimensional jigsaw. No sooner than he had completed it than Kabuto took it away, handing him another one of a similar size, though it was of different build and make, and instructing him to dismantle it and then reconstruct it. Naruto complied. Kabuto had left the room while Naruto completed his task. Though the older boy tried to hide it, Naruto could tell he was pleased when he returned to find Naruto practicing with the newly reconstructed mannequin, making it walk and fight.

Enthusiastic though Naruto was in all areas of his studies, in no subject was he more attentive than fuinjutsu. Naruto came to anticipate his time spent with Kushina-sensei, or Kaa-sensei as he came to know her.

Every time they met, he brought new ideas to run by her. She, in turn, suggested variations to consider and explained various concepts he could apply to all of his seals. In addition to this, she continued teaching him more common seals; always breaking them down first and teaching the basics and the components first, so that even after he learned the seal she was specifically teaching about he could apply the inner working to other projects. As of yet, Naruto had not completed any of the seals, preferring to develop all of them as far as he could before he got down to the relatively simple business of drawing up the seal.

After several weeks, Naruto had learned to make not only exploding seals, but also how to make various vacuum seals. Kushina had also explained about Summoning seals to him, bemoaning the fact that she had no summoning contract to show him. She also described a varied wealth of situations in which seals could be useful and how one seal could be changed with the tiniest of variations to be more efficient or more effective.

As with all of the things Kushina told Naruto, he seemed to immediately grasp the concept of different variations of the same type of seal and began adding subtypes to all of his ideas, variables that could be exploited and variables that should be dealt with to make the seal design sleeker and more foolproof.

After those several weeks, Naruto was sitting at his desk in his room during one of his few days off, copying down a diagram from the book he was holding open with his left hand. There was a tap at the door.

"Come in, Kabuto," Naruto said, not looking up.

Kabuto entered, a rueful smile on his face. "Busy?" he asked.

Naruto nodded, carefully laying his pencil down in the crease between the open pages of his book to keep his place. With one last lingering look as his copied diagram, he swiveled around in his chair. "What do you need?" he asked.

"How about this?" Kabuto asked, holding the door open wider. "I won't ask the obvious, 'How did you know it was me at the door?' question and you come with me to take another vitamin supplement."

Naruto smirked, standing and crossing to the door in a few strides. "I knew it was you because no one else comes to visit me here," he explained.

Kabuto locked the door as they left, before leading Naruto down the hallway, toward the labs. "I know. That's why I didn't ask."


	5. Chapter 4

Kabuto nodded, removed Naruto's clothes, placed a oxygen-mask on his face, stuck a heart-rate-detector to his chest, placed a catheter into his arm that was long enough for him and Orochimaru to inject the solutions and nourishment from the outside and tossed him into the prepared tank filled with a clear liquid. Then he injected the first solution. Now all they could do is wait. From their past experiments, Kabuto deduced that they would have to wait half an hour before something happened. Usually then the subjects croaked, but Kabuto was hoping that that didn't happen here, or he'd be in a lot of trouble and a world of hurt. They left long before Naruto's body started to thrash.

Kabuto had decided to wait an hour, so that the changes had more time to take place. When he entered, the first thing he heard was the calming peeping of the machine, telling Kabuto that Naruto's heart was still beating. But he decided to take a blood-sample and checked if Naruto now had the _Shikotsumyaku_ or if the fox had chosen the easy way out and simply burned the solution out of the boy's system. That had been his greatest worry, especially since he didn't share it with Orochimaru beforehand.

Orochimaru looked at Kabuto, expecting positive news. "And?" He asked.

Kabuto smiled. "He survived. I checked his blood, just in case, and the results are positive. He has the bloodline."

Orochimaru smiled. "Excellent. We'll give him a day to recover, then we'll inject the sample."

**The next day**

"This is a compound that contains genetic material salvaged from the scales of Samehada. Your predictions about both the powers it would give the boy and how it would affect him physically were rather vague."

Kabuto whitened. "Surely you are not suggesting that we give him that now!"

Orochimaru's smile dropped abruptly and he narrowed his eyes. Kabuto seemed to realize his mistake, as he swallowed and bent his head, breaking eye contact to regard the floor. "Know your place, Kabuto," Orochimaru said coldly, "and do not presume to question me. If you are concerned about hiding the changes from the boy, I'd advise you to keep him sedated until you have a course of action in that regard. Otherwise, the boy's training is to resume as usual once he wakes up. Keep him practicing seals and puppetry, but as for jutsu, there will be no need to teach him more than advanced control exercises and the basic three. If you have promised to teach him anything, do not disappoint, keep up your act, but begin to focus more on the boy's physical training."

"Yes, Orochimaru-sama."

Orochimaru considered Kabuto's still-inclined head. "Do not disappoint me, Kabuto. My patience where the boy is concerned is all but non-existent. You would do well not to try it."

"No more than I would expect, Orochimaru-sama." Kabuto winced as he felt a brief rush of air, heard the slam of the door that led to the hallway. He straightened up, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand and pushing up his glasses with the other. After a moment of staring at the door, unseeing, gathering his thoughts, he turned toward where Naruto lay on the table. Slowly, deliberately, he began to hook the younger boy up to all of the various monitors and meters that he had become accustomed to checking during these brief spells of Naruto's unconsciousness.

When he was finished, he administered another shot of sedative- The Kyuubi would ensure it didn't kill the blonde, and Kabuto really didn't want the boy waking up now, not after all of their secrecy in these matters. Then, holding his right hand steady with his left, he injected Naruto with the infusion.

And sat down to wait. And observe.

Barely ten minutes after administering the compound, Kabuto noticed something. A definite darkening of the veins around Naruto's right forearm, where he had injected the fluid. Though the prick-mark had healed the instant the needle had been removed, the darkness spread. By the time twenty minutes had passed since initial injection, all of the veins in Naruto's right arm from wrist to shoulder were swollen, pressing against his skin, purple-black and pulsing. Over the next hour, there was nothing Kabuto could do but watch helplessly as the dark veins claimed more of Naruto's body, spreading down around his chest, right shoulder blade, ribs, and even curling around his and lower back. It was half and hour after Kabuto gloomily noted the veins were visible clearly around Naruto's right hip that it happened.

The darkened veins had been spreading slowly across Naruto's face, and had long since formed thick, ropey masses centering on his eyes. Kabuto reached out a hand and gently turned Naruto's head to see the veins creeping around the back of his head, disappearing under his hair. Kabuto just barely noted the dark mass that had settled over the base of the blonde boy's skull, before he felt a tingling sensation in his fingertips. Hastily, he whipped his hand back, flexing his fingers and rubbing life back into them. It didn't seem that much damage had been done. In fact, it merely felt as though the fingers that had been touching Naruto's head had fallen asleep, the blood paused in its circulation.

_He drained the chakra in my fingers?_ Kabuto leaned over Naruto, and as his shadow fell over the boy, blocking the fluorescent light from his face, Naruto's eyes flew open. Kabuto backed up hastily at the sight of those eyes. They were the same cloudy purple-black as the malignant veins that mapped out most of Naruto's body, pupil, sclera, and all.

Naruto stared unseeingly at the ceiling, and for a moment, it seemed that he was straining every muscle in his body, fighting against the restraints. Then he slumped, his eyes half-closing. Kabuto watched as the darkness drained from those eyes, receding and leaving the eyes their normal bright blue. The silver-haired boy could not help but sigh in relief as the blackness began to dissipate from Naruto's veins. The process took far less time than it had taken for the darkness to spread in the first place, and twenty minutes later, there was almost no trace that Naruto's appearance had ever changed.

Kabuto, satisfied, was on the point of unstrapping the boy and unhooking him from the monitors, when, on impulse, he decided to test a hunch of his. Surrounding his hand in the familiar green glow of a healing jutsu, he lowered his hand toward Naruto's right arm.

The response was immediate. Tiny, gray-blue scales pushed through the skin beneath Kabuto's hand, eagerly expanding and contracting as they absorbed Kabuto's jutsu. As Kabuto brought his hand away, noting that not even the smallest amount of chakra remained from his jutsu, he was in time to study the small scales properly. They were thicker and wider than a snake's scales, baring sharp-looking edges. Though they held a similar overlapping pattern to snake scales, they did not quite lie flat. No sooner than he had assessed this much, however, the scales withdrew, leaving behind little slits in the skin that were instantly healed, no doubt through Kyuubi-induced methods.

Kabuto let out a long breath, running both hands over his face, hard, pushing his glasses up onto his forehead as he did so. This would require many more tests and, if the time when Naruto had been given Konan's DNA was any indicator, buckets of sedative.

fter nearly half a week of tests, of frantically scribbling notes, of letting sleep take a backseat to keeping Naruto in his drug-induced state, Kabuto was just about ready to hand this assignment over to someone else.

Through methodical trial-and-error, Kabuto had discovered a number of useful facts about Naruto's new abilities. For one thing, range did not appear to be a factor. Jutsu used _around_ Naruto remained intact, at least unless they got too close. The scales did not manifest until jutsu that were directed at Naruto were less than five inches from his skin, at which point they would spring forth and absorb the incoming jutsu, or rather, they would unravel the incoming jutsu and transfer it into pure chakra and absorb that in less than a second. This applied to elemental jutsu as well, absorbing the innate natural chakra from the attacks and leaving the elements themselves untouched. After those tests, Kabuto could generally be found brushing ordinary dirt off of his test subject.

For another thing, the scales would appear only on the area of skin that would have been affected by whatever jutsu was headed Naruto's way and nowhere else, and did so consistently without conscious direction from the sleeping boy. Kabuto also learned that the scales would only absorb chakra from jutsu directed _at_ Naruto. Genjutsu or kawirimis were in no way affected by the absorption, even when used within the five inches of the unconscious boy's skin or on Naruto himself. On a similar note, when Kabuto laid his hand on Naruto's arm, concentrating on not channeling any chakra at all, he found that the scales did not appear to begin sucking away at his inactive reserves. When he began to channel unformed chakra in a manner similar to what was required for a leaf-floating exercise, however, that chakra was instantly absorbed.

In addition to these discoveries, Kabuto found that the scales themselves did not provide a layer of armor thick enough to protect from any attacks that were purely physical. When cut apart with a kunai, smashed, removed, chipped, or damaged by ordinary fire, that is to say that the flames which contained no chakra, or damaged in any other way Kabuto cared to test, the scales regrew whole within seconds, but did nothing to stop the physical attacks from reaching Naruto's skin beneath.

Kushina had plenty of time to affix a smirk to her face as Kabuto made his way into her cell. Once more, he sat down before her, his back resting against the door. "'Sup, string bean?" she asked, before he had a chance to speak.

Kabuto smiled coldly. "Just business, I'm afraid."

"Aw, Kabuto," Kushina whined. "How many times do I have to tell you? If you decide you want anything that _isn't_ strictly business, don't contact me! I'm not going to pay you for that stuff!"

Kabuto's expression was slightly bored as he continued. "One of our useful spies in Konoha reports that the Hokage, while never having been worried in the past about you disappearance all those years ago, is getting suspicious that he has not received a letter from you yet."

Kushina's eyes narrowed. She couldn't help it. "What lies are you feeding Sarutobi-sama?" she snarled.

"The Hokage is under the impression that you finally tracked Naruto down after all of these years and immediately brought him away from Konoha, not stopping first to visit Hokage-sama." Kabuto shook his head mockingly. "How impolite."

"What do you want with me, then?"

"You are going to write your friend Sarutobi a letter, in which you will tell him that you and Naruto are safe and together."

"And why would I do that?"

"Because if you do not, we will hurt Naruto," Kabuto said simply. "And if you attempt to write in code, or you write something I do not find suitable, you will start again, and will not receive your antidote until you have finished. Wouldn't it be a shame if Naruto became an orphan? What would we tell him? After all, he already thinks he is one. But to lose his Kaa-sensei…."

"Okay, letter, got it. Anything else, scumbag?" Kushina growled.

"As a matter of fact, yes." Kabuto resisted the impulse to push up his glasses. Kushina smirked, and Kabuto knew that she had seen his hand twitch and guessed his thought process.

"Well?"

"You are on no account to use any jutsu on or against Naruto."

Kushina's lip curled. "I gotta say, Kabuto, that's pretty low, even for you. Was there a doubt that I wouldn't use jutsu against a harmless kid? Because if there was, I'd just love to know the reason for it. Is he dangerous or unstable? Shouldn't you be telling me these things?"

This time, Kabuto really did push his glasses farther up his nose. It gave him time to consider the phrasing of his answer. "Of course there is nothing wrong with your son. We're taking excellent care of him."

"Which certainly puts my mind at rest, you can be sure."

Kabuto smiled coldly. "Stick to writing your letters to Hokage-sama and let the rest of us worry about our jobs."

Kushina snorted. "Jobs? That's a bit of an overstatement. From all _I've_ observed, you're just Orochimaru's bitch, doing his dirty work and delivering his warnings."

"And yet, I can leave, while the more cynical of the two of us will have to remain here, power dampened." Kabuto stood and turned his back on Kushina, placing a hand on the doorknob.

From behind him, Kushina spoke up once more. "I'd be careful if I were you. Not that I give a shit what happens to you in here, but don't be so quick to assume you'll be able to just walk out on the service of the old Snake."

Kabuto stood, indecisive. Should he answer? Without turning around, he said quietly, "That's the second time you've said something in that vein. Do you know something I don't?"

"Only what happened to me." Kabuto heard the rattle of chains and allowed his eyes to fall closed briefly. He left without looking at the red-haired woman.

For the third time since he had arrived at the labs, Naruto opened his eyes to see the now-familiar surroundings of his bedroom with no memory of the previous days. He sat up, tense, running his fingers through his spiky hair. "Hey, Kabuto," he said tentatively. Less than a minute later, the silver-haired boy appeared holding a stack of books, pushing open the door to peer down at Naruto, still perched on the edge of his bed, cradling his head in his hands.

An ice-cold sliver of panic wriggled into Kabuto's heart at the sight. Did Naruto suspect? "You called?" he said tentatively.

Naruto dropped his hands into his lap and turned his head to face the older boy, frowning. "Kabuto, why is it that when you take me away for these vitamins, I always wake up in my bed with this big gap in my memory?"

Kabuto, seeking to hide the fact that his mind was in a whirling panic, stepped fully into the room, allowing the door to swing closed behind him. "Ah, I see that I must have forgotten to inform you. You see, the vitamins you are taking have a slight anesthetic mixed in, just as a fail-safe for any unexpected side-effects, which ends up putting you to sleep and, I assume, affecting your memory."

"I don't like that it's messing with my memory," Naruto said, a low growl in his voice. "Why didn't you tell me that would happen?"

"I didn't tell you it would because usually it doesn't. It only affects certain patients the way it does you, and I had no idea it would do that to you," Kabuto invented, keeping his blank, clinical façade up.

"Can't you find a way to give me the vitamins but not the memory-loss?" Naruto asked.

Kabuto resisted the urge to sag with relief. "I'll see what I can come up with, but I'll make no promises.

"Alright, then." Naruto stood, waited for Kabuto to leave, then followed the older boy out into the hallway. "So, what's on today's agenda?"

"Take a guess." Kabuto led Naruto through the compound and into one of their usual training rooms. On one of the tables in the room were a few large crates and sheets of paper.

Without waiting to be asked, Naruto moved to investigate the crates. Removing the lids, he peered inside, before pulling out a piece of wood roughly a foot long. It had a joint partway down its length, allowing it to bend in one direction. Naruto examined the piece for a moment, turning it around and testing the joint. Finally, he glanced up a Kabuto. "Puppet arm?" he asked.

Kabuto nodded affirmation.

Naruto weighed the piece in his hands, frowning. "It's pretty heavy to be part of battle-puppet. I'm guessing there aren't any hidden compartments, which would make it lighter as well as make good places to put weapons, either for storage or so the puppet could wield them."

"Very good," Kabuto said, giving a rare smile. "You're right, no one is going to be using the pieces of this puppet to fight. They're only here to help you with the next project I want you to work on."

"And what's that?"

"I want you to take a good look at all of these puppet pieces and design three different puppets using only these parts. For now, design only how the pieces would be constructed, not how the puppet would be augmented. I want you to make two of the designs humanoid and the last one abstract or animal-like, using the same pieces."

Naruto nodded, placing the crates on a different table and beginning to unload parts from them. "Am I allowed to assume, in my designs, that I can dismantle pieces where they have joints?"

"For the abstract design and one of the humanoid ones, yes. However, I would like you to construct one of the humanoid designs on the understanding that you cannot alter the pieces here. However, joints are no problem, so you may plan to use hinged joints as ball-and-socket joints instead, if you prefer. Just remember when you are drawing up your designs, these puppets will be meant for battle, so plan accordingly."

Naruto nodded, not looking up from where he was arranging the wooden parts and Kabuto wondered if Naruto was even listening to him. Kabuto shrugged internally. The boy looked like he knew what he was doing. So Kabuto took a chair from one of the tables in the room and dragged it toward the wall. He sat, pulling his knees up until he could cross his legs in the seat of the chair, and turned to the small pile of books he had brought. They were to be Naruto's next reading assignments, but Kabuto wanted to skim through them again before he gave them to the boy.

It was no more than an hour later that Naruto showed Kabuto his sketches. There were notes all over the margins, showing how pieces would slot together, and showing different angles of the puppets, which Kabuto had forgotten to tell Naruto to do. _He's really benefitting from Sasori's IQ, despite how young he is._

"Very good," Kabuto said, and Naruto beamed at the praise. "Now, I want you to apply seals to these. Take into account how large the seals would be, how visible, what they would be crafted of, their purposes, etc. Try to include some that are not primarily battle-oriented. In addition, I want you to outfit the puppets with weapons. That should require you to make a decision as to what type of fighter the particular puppet would specialize in being used by and against. If possible, plan how do alter these three designs so that they look essentially the same on the outside as you've planned them already, but have a very different function."

Naruto scratched the back of his head, frowning. "That'll take a while to plan."

"Take all the time you need." Kabuto settled down with his books once more, giving the impression that the discussion was over and that Naruto was to get started.

The next time Kushina saw Naruto, he was full of questions and proposals. From what Naruto was telling her about these puppets Kabuto had him designing, Kushina's job at this point seemed to be to answer Naruto's questions and show him how to design seals to achieve the effects he was talking about.

Kushina refused to do the work for him, though. Instead, she continued teaching him the steps, techniques, and components he would need to come up with the solutions on his own. By doing this and by asking just the right questions, Kushina succeeded in getting Naruto to design entire sets of seals, including ones that had nothing to do with the purposes he seemed to have had in mind in the first place.

Kushina noticed that, while Naruto wrote down every one of his ideas, often in shorthand, so they were incomprehensible to any but him, Naruto never completed a single original design. Not once did she see the boy draw out a final version of any of the seals he was designing. When asked about it, Naruto waved the question away, explaining that he was much more concerned about the ideas themselves than the physical designs, which, he claimed, wouldn't take long to draw up anyway.

Kushina couldn't help but agree with him on that point. From the moment Kushina had told Naruto that it was possible to refine seal designs so that less strokes were required, making them faster and easier to draw, Naruto had begun applying this principle to nearly all of his designs, testing just how much he could modify and simplify standard designs of basic seals before their effects began to vary. All in all, Naruto was beginning to think of seals in terms of how efficient he could make them, a principle that seemed odd considering how seemingly useless some of his seals were.

The entire time, Kushina was sneaking looks at Naruto as he worked. He didn't seem any different than he had been before, and yet she could not forget Kabuto's words. Surely Orochimaru wanted more with Naruto than just benefit from his sealing skills. _The sooner I get the two of us out of here, the better._

Though Kushina was fast falling into the loose routine of writing letters to the Hokage, always with their content dictated to her by Kabuto or one of the old Snake's other lackeys, she did not hold out hope that she could, through these missives, expect help from Konoha. The letters were always very carefully read over, and if even one phrase fell wrongly on Kabuto's ears, the entire thing would have to be re-written.

How Kushina hated servitude.

Kabuto, intending to follow Orochimaru's instructions regarding Naruto's physical training, was temporarily taken aback when Naruto approached him with an idea in that vein before Kabuto had so much as broached the subject.

"Y'see, I have this seal I want to try out. I think it would really help both my physical and sealing training. So, what d'you say?" Naruto smiled nervously.

Kabuto frowned a little. A forbidding sight. "What exactly is the intended effect of this seal you are proposing?"

"It's a weight seal, like the training seals they mentioned in one of the books you gave me, but much less clunky and more easily adjustable."

Now Kabuto looked slightly bemused. He was already aware that when he gave Naruto passages to read, more often than not the younger boy ended up reading the entire book or section, but this… "You remember a passing mention of training weights in one of the books I gave you? After you read it only once?"

"Well, yes." Naruto shifted from foot to foot. "So, what do you think?"

"By all means, if you have designed a seal that acts similarly to these training weights, who am I to stop you? Though I do have one suggestion and a rule."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yes. My suggestion is that you test this seal first on another object, and then by writing it on your skin in ink before you go ahead and inscribe it permanently. Make sure you can draw it competently with both hands, or ask me if you need help." _I suppose Kushina would be better at this, but I cannot risk her trying to turn this to her advantage._

"And what's the rule you mentioned?" Naruto asked, some apprehension still clear on his face. Kabuto made a mental note to give Naruto a book on body language, and another on masking one's emotions.

"The rule is that only I shall be allowed to set the weights of these seals. I am something of a medical specialist, and I don't want you to accidentally overtax your muscles. That could prove far more damaging than beneficial." _Even though the Kyuubi will probably make this procedure much faster and effective than it would be on the average shinobi._

"I understand." Naruto scampered off to begin his designs.

Orochimaru laid down the report with a sigh. Really, he would have to remind Kabuto that not every note the silver-haired boy made during these procedures was necessary for Orochimaru to personally view. The boy had written positive _reams._ And while the scientist side of Orochimaru approved, and even encouraged, the thorough reports, he was still slightly resentful that such detail showed that he was expected to personally read every word.

He was not pleased at what Kabuto had to tell him, anyway. From what he could gather from Kabuto's highly verbose report, Samehada's abilities had not spread completely to all parts of his new skin. He was hesitant to order that the boy be injected once more with the same strain, unless the double dose proved to difficult for the Kyuubi to counterbalance. Orochimaru caught himself sincerely hoping that the scales did not choose to permanently manifest once the Kyuubi was extracted. _So much for the perfect host. The best that could happen is that the scale coverage could extend during the next year and a half to cover the boy's body entirely._

Orochimaru stood, surveying where he had pinned up his designs for the project he had been dubbing 'The Cursed Seal.' It was something as a joke, as he had come up with the name in a fit of frustration when the project had seemed to be going badly some weeks ago. However, his lab assistants had immediately adopted the name, believing it alluded to the fact that almost every test subject to whom the seal had been applied thus far had died, and the Snake sannin had not bothered to correct this conception.

Thankfully, the project was going much more smoothly now, and a new batch of test subjects was expected within a few days. Once they were briefed and primed, the seal could once again be tested. Orochimaru idly wondered how he could apply it this time. Branding, in his opinion, was far too messy a process, and had, anyway, yielded poor results. Perhaps a method more in keeping with his innate, snake-like tendencies was in order…

How Orochimaru wished he could pick Kushina's brains on the subject. In fact, once or twice, he had even attempted to do just that, but was rewarded only with insolence and aspersions cast on his sexual orientation. As if he had the time to spare for such thoughts…

Turning his back on the plans for his Cursed Seal, Orochimaru retrieved Kabuto's predictions once more, perusing them as he had done so often already. _Kabuto claims that neither the boy nor his mother yet has any idea of the experiments. However, I have so far given the boy only the samples the effects of which are most easily hidden. Based on these predictions, it will be much more difficult to keep up the charade from here on out._ And so Orochimaru reached a decision.

_I shall wait to give the boy another sample. Instead of spacing them out evenly over two years as I had intended, I will instruct Kabuto to implement a more strict training regime for the next few months, after which I will have the boy receive the last few samples within the same four or five month period._

Orochimaru cast his eyes over the predictions. _And when it_does_come time for his next infusion, I think_this_one is the only logical choice._


	6. Chapter 5

Naruto sat up straight, the wall behind him supporting his back. Kabuto sat perpendicular to Naruto, slightly to one side of the boy, his eyes flickering from Naruto's still form to the larger form at the other end of the room. This was Naruto's new challenge, and Kabuto was determined to see the younger boy through it.

The puppet twitched as Kabuto watched. He flicked his eyes back to Naruto whose face was entirely blank, no hint of exertion or emotion to be seen. Slowly, The puppet went through a series of Taijutsu stances. Then again, slightly faster. And again. Each time the routine was repeated, Naruto picked up the pace a little until the wooden construct was a whirling picture of formidable opposition.

And still Naruto betrayed no emotion, no movement, not even the tiniest flick of his fingers.

Kabuto smirked, withdrawing a kunai and approaching, remembering as he did so the instructions that he had given Naruto several weeks ago when they had begun these exercises.

"Now, Naruto, you remember, I hope, what we have discussed about energy?"

"What about it?" Naruto asked absently, hunched over in his chair and minutely examining the tiny puppet he was marking up, figuring the best places to put seals.

"How energy in a human's body can be converted to kinetic energy or chakra?" Kabuto prompted.

"Mm. What about heat and sound? Those are forms of energy, too."

"Yes, that is true. However, for purposes of this discussion, I think I can say that it is safe to disregard them."

"I thought it was never safe to disregard information, despite how seemingly trivial. After all, heat and sound are very obvious forms of energy that can blow your cover if you're not careful."

"I concede. Those are excellent points." Kabuto admitted, voice devoid of the biting resentment he felt at having his own lectures quoted back to him.

"I learned from the best." Naruto finally set down the doll-sized puppet and turned to properly face the older boy. "So, what about energy did you want to say?"

"Just a word on your puppet manipulation. Now, you know that in a real battle situation a puppet is a long-range weapon meant to keep your enemy away from your body while you control the puppet, yes?"

"Yeah, I know."

"However, it doesn't always work that way, particularly if you are fighting multiple opponents with one puppet. In that case, it is often hard to engage in a close-range fight and maintain puppet manipulation simultaneously. Which is why you have to work on conserving your energy."

Naruto heaved an unhappy sigh. "I thought you said I was good on conserving chakra."

"Correction, I said your chakra control was adequate for the time being." The truth was, Naruto's chakra control, augmented by that in Sasori's genes, was slightly above-average for one his age, quite a feat for someone with Naruto's capacity.

"Well, then?"

"I want you to work on preserving not just your chakra, but also your body's other energy."

"Any particular way you want me to go about doing that?"

Kabuto pushed up his glasses, hiding his eye roll. Really, Naruto could be kind of a brat. He was getting training like most academy students could only dream of. It wasn't like he knew that it came with a price higher than almost any would be willing to pay. "Yes, in fact. I want you to take control of one of the larger puppets you've made and make it move without moving your body. At all. You must control and move it only by manipulating it with chakra strings. This way, you will only use exactly as much chakra as is needed and will expend no extra energy."

Naruto frowned. "That sounds counter-productive."

"In what way does that sound at all counter-productive?" Kabuto asked, keeping his annoyance from bleeding into his voice.

"I'd be learning to not move while moving the puppet. I thought it was better to be mobile than to be a sitting duck."

"One step at a time, Naruto. This will teach you to use energy efficiently, have better control over your puppet, and allow you to eventually focus on moving your body separately of how you manipulate your puppet."

"Oh, okay then."

It was now several months removed from when Naruto had received the previous DNA sample, and since then Kabuto had been focusing on Naruto's physical training, exposing him to a wide variety of taijutsu styles and battle scenarios. Always he stressed how Naruto, not yet even a qualified genin, would be at a disadvantage in almost any fight he would be drawn into and had to plan for every eventuality.

In the meantime, Naruto was up to the third setting of his weight-seals, although Kabuto had him turn off the effects of the seals a few times a week so that his fighting styles did not develop a dependency on them. In addition, Kabuto had cautioned Naruto once more against raising the settings too soon, lest he overtax himself. Naruto had considered these concerns to be unnecessary, as he himself knew just how fast his body healed from even major injuries.

For lack of anything better to start on, Kabuto had begun teaching Naruto a few minor genjutsu. These did not grab Naruto's imagination nearly as thoroughly as fuinjutsu had, but he was still sufficiently fascinated to ask Kushina and Kabuto question after question, ranging from the dispelling of genjutsu to the creation and maintenance of a three-dimensional illusion scenario. He was curious whether one could dispel a genjutsu without alerting the caster to the fact that one had done so and whether one could set up a permanent genjutsu, affecting someone's perception of a certain object or person, for example.

Naruto was still receiving instruction from Kushina on seals, and though he usually stuck to that topic when in her presence, the two did not restrict their conversations, discussing techniques and new ideas in a variety of areas.

As Naruto had not received a new DNA infusion for quite some time, Kabuto had begun giving Naruto sugar pills periodically for the sake of appearances. The boy had been pleased to report that he wasn't forgetting things after each dose, as he had been before. Kabuto wondered how Naruto would feel about the new holes in his memory when Kabuto was invariably instructed to continue the ongoing experiment. Oh well, he would just have to cross those bridges when he came to them.

Kushina quickly schooled her expression as he cell door opened. "If it isn't my favorite little tyrant," she snarked. "I was missing the dulcet tones of your bitchass whining. What's up?"

Kabuto raised an eyebrow. "For once, this visit might be considered by some, in the very loosest sense of the words of course, a social call."

"Only if those some are blind, deaf, and comatose, Kabuto," Kushina said in an annoyingly knowing voice, "As you are not being the least bit social at all."

Kabuto pouted mockingly, "Ah, don't you like me at all, Kushina-sama?"

Kushina stared at Kabuto hard for a second, and then slowly shook her head. "Wow, you sounded uncannily like a certain snake-in-the-grass right there." She said grimly. "You're young, you've got your life ahead of you. Don't fuck up your chances by letting that creep rub off on you."

Kabuto sighed. "As usual, I require neither your sympathy nor your guidance, and yet you give it so freely. Are you actually so concerned for my wellbeing?"

"Believe it or not, Kabuto, yes, I am."

Kabuto pushed up his glasses. "Excuse me?"

"You see, Kabuto, I once had a son. Oh, he was much younger than you are, but I had to watch as he was taken away to endure a fate that I knew would be little better than torture. I _knew_ what was in store for him. I had experienced the same thing. And yet I let it be done to him, to _my own child. _I know lives were saved because of it, but that almost makes it worse, because it gives the action justification and means that I didn't try to search for an alternative."

"What does this have to do with your inexplicably wishing me not to come to harm?"

"I just don't want you to throw away what you have for the sake of what you think the 'easy thing' is."

"In my experience, taking the morally correct path tends to lead to less rewards than does the path of instant gratification."

"Really? That surprises me. I would have thought you were one of those 'wait until the right moment and then do what is needed' guys."

"You're not far off. I'm more like one of those 'wait until the opportunity presents itself and then take it' guys."

"So you're not backing down?"

"Not unless you do the same."

Kushina snorted. "You impress me less every time we speak."

"Interesting how you can say that without really knowing anything about me. Didn't you spend your entire life dealing with those imbeciles who judged and spoke before deigning to gather information?"

"It's not the same."

"Isn't it?" Kabuto stared at her. It was the closest she had ever seen the silver-haired teen come to a glare. "At least Naruto is happier here than he was in Konoha. At least there are people here looking out for him."

Kushina flinched and her cuffs clinked in the brief silence. "If I know the Big Man, Naruto won't be happy forever as long as he's here."

"You don't know that."

"Yes, I do."

Kabuto pushed his glasses up viciously, so that the light glared off of the lenses momentarily. "Maybe you're right. But it certainly won't make you feel better if he isn't." He stood up. "I'll leave you to your compositions."

Kabuto frowned. "Your form is sloppy."

"No it's not," Naruto said tightly. He stepped forward and threw a punch, then another. Kabuto dodged, and when Naruto's next punch went wide, Kabuto worked his way into Naruto's guard and knocked him down on his ass. He placed a foot on Naruto's chest, staring him down.

"Your _form_ is _sloppy,_ Naruto. You're not focusing. What's going on?"

Naruto didn't reply, didn't even struggle, just avoided Kabuto's eyes and braced his hands against the floor, levering himself up into a sitting position. After a minute, he mumbled under his breath.

"Excuse me?"

"I asked how long it's been since I got here."

"You mean since you arrived at this facility?"

Naruto rolled his eyes. "_No,_ I meant since I was born, Kabuto. Of course since I arrived at the facility."

"A little under two years. Why?"

"When do I get to go home?" Kabuto hesitated. Naruto had hardly ever shown signs of wanting to return to Konoha. Kabuto had been led to believe that the boy's life there had, sad to say, been a many times more miserable affair than the one he was experiencing as an experiment.

"Do you want to go home?"

Naruto looked up, alarm in his eyes. "Of course I do! How will I be Hokage if I don't take my genin exam in Konoha?"

"Is that the only reason you want to return?"

Naruto didn't respond. Kabuto eventually sat down, watching Naruto watch the floor. "Why do you want to be Hokage, anyway?" he asked softly.

"Why did you become a shinobi?" Naruto shot back.

"Well…" Kabuto adjusted his glasses. He had never really talked like this before, talked about himself. "I was found on a battle field when I was very young. Right after the Battle of Kikyo Pass. You may not have heard of it. It took place near the end of the Third Great Shinobi War. In any case, I was found by the captain of the Konoha Medic Corps. He adopted me, but I think he had his misgivings about taking me in. For the longest time I barely spoke. Even when I had settled in, I didn't want to play with other children. I didn't even cry. The other medics said that it was Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but I knew it wasn't; I couldn't even remember what happened on the day they found me- I was too young. I just didn't see things the way the civilian children did. Everything was a potential danger that had to be accounted for and carefully worked around or counteracted."

"And that led you to become a shinobi?" Naruto asked, frowning until his brow creased.

"I was always studying people, Naruto. Other children, adults, authority figures, people no one respected, everyone. I classified them, sorted them, and when the time came that I was asked which group I wanted to belong to, I decided to look up to the shinobi. Silent, efficient, respected, feared. I did make one concession, however. I was well aware of my own abilities, my gifts, my curses. I decided to become a medic shinobi, which not only put my father's mind at rest, but seemed the right path for me. I don't regret it."

"Have you ever wondered what would have happened if you had chosen differently?"

"No."

A beat.

"Are you having second thoughts on becoming a shinobi, Naruto?" Kabuto asked.

"No, I'm seeing this through, even if it takes another two years for me to become a genin."

Kabuto gave a half-smile. "Titles mean practically nothing, Naruto. If you were a jonin-level shinobi with nothing but a genin headband to your name, would you be overpowered by a chunin just because he had a vest and you didn't?"

"No, I guess not." Naruto stood up and offered Kabuto a hand. "It's still nice to have that recognition, though."

"True." Kabuto used Naruto's hand to help himself up. He looked down at the younger boy. Naruto was still obviously preoccupied. A tiny spark of regret bloomed somewhere inside of Kabuto. "Do you want to learn a new jutsu?" he asked abruptly.

Naruto's head jerked up. "Seriously?"

"Oh, why not?"

Orochimaru looked on from the adjoining observation room. Kabuto had begun teaching the boy to Shunshin. Orochimaru was slightly wary of teaching the boy a jutsu that could potentially lead to his escaping, but after what he had said about seeing the program through, Orochimaru wasn't unduly worried. It wasn't as if he could tell Kabuto off, as the silver-haired boy had requested a list of approved jutsu to teach to Naruto and Orochimaru had gotten one of his lab assistants to do it. Orochimaru had long since mastered the art of delegating. He had given the list a cursory glance before passing it on and he was pretty sure that Shunshin had been on it.

Orochimaru returned to his office, settling himself at his desk as usual and pushing away a stack of papers that was gradually breeding on the polished surface. He carefully set aside a glass jar, not sparing the hand and ring inside a second glance. He had work to do.

In a little under six months, his current skin could be shed. Which meant stepping up the infusion process on behalf of the new one. Orochimaru ran through the checklist in his head, _the Paper Witch, the Puppet Master, the Leech. _He considered his options. He knew he had limited time in which to distribute the remaining six samples, and some of them were better given sooner than later. He just hoped that some samples, like Hidan's or Itachi's- or even Pein's- would give the boy exactly the same powers as those possessed by the 'donors'.

Another thing to take into account was the fact that some of the infusions would be regrettably obvious to the boy. Despite what he told his erstwhile lackey, Orochimaru actually did care whether or not the boy was aware of the process. The child of Kushina would most likely object if he discovered at the wrong time what was being done to him. And the last thing that Orochimaru needed was for his precious test subject to take his own life and thereby prevent his skin being dedicated to a higher purpose.

Glancing one last time over the list of remaining infusions, Orochimaru reached a decision.

Kabuto was profoundly glad that Naruto's room was sealed against his using jutsu inside. Now that Naruto could Shunshin, it was much more difficult to keep up with him in spars, particularly when he would intersperse his Shunshin with Kawirimi. Kabuto would turn, searching for Naruto after he had disappeared and then have to hastily dodge a falling log. He hadn't been hit by one yet, but it was only a matter of time, and when that time came, Naruto would never let him live it down.

Recently, Naruto had begun getting bored being cooped up in his room, sometimes for hours at a time. He had resorted to asking Kabuto if he could wander around the labs when Kabuto was elsewhere. Kabuto refused, instead offering to let Naruto watch an autopsy.

Naruto warily accepted, reassured when Kabuto told him that he did not have to stay if he couldn't handle it. To which Naruto responded that any shinobi worth anything should not be squeamish at the sight of blood. Kabuto left it at that, choosing not to respond.

Naruto stared at the body reposing on the brushed steel table. It was tastefully covered by a sheet, but Kabuto could tell that Naruto was taking in the dimensions and approximate build and making an age estimate. He nodded in approval, moving to pull the sheet back just far enough to show the woman's face.

He heard Naruto give a sharp intake of breath and turned to see him. He was pale, although, to give him credit, he was approaching the table rather than backing away.

"How-" he stopped. Cleared his throat. "Who is she?"

Kabuto shrugged. "Unknown. Her body was discovered yesterday. Autopsy is standard in determining whether it was homicide or not."

Naruto looked confused and more than a little disturbed. "You mean she wasn't killed by a shinobi or samurai?"

Kabuto glanced down, surprised. "Naruto, civilians kill each other all the time. Just because they don't have training or authorization in certain cases like shinobi or samurai doesn't mean they can't be brutal."

"Trust me, I know that." Naruto swallowed once more. "Just… why? Why did she die?"

"No idea. I'm just here for the how. For all we know, it was natural causes. Or at least, probably not, because thirty-five to forty-five year-old women like her don't usually drop dead for no reason, but until we take a look, it could be anything."

Naruto nodded slowly, numbly. Kabuto took it as a sign that he was going to be alright. He went over to one of the sinks set against the wall to wash his hands before pulling on a pair of gloves. He extracted a pair of face masks from a box, turning to offer one to Naruto.

Naruto did not hold out a hand to take it. He was scrutinizing Kabuto as intently as he had just been staring at the body. Kabuto lowered his hand. "What is it?" He asked. He was getting sick of asking that of late. He was not accustomed to caring for the wellbeing of those around him. If one of Orochimaru-sama's lab rats was whining about his job that day, it was put up or shut up. Kabuto was not expected to tolerate it and he most certainly did not appreciate it when there was work to be done. Research was a tough job to get into, particularly for civilians, and those who worked under Orochimaru-sama were easily and often replaced.

Naruto just frowned in response. It almost looked fierce, for a twelve-year-old. "Just thinking," he said slowly. "Is this what you do when I'm not around you?"

"Sometimes, yes, but less than you would expect," Kabuto conceded. It was mostly true- in fact most of the bodies he examined were nothing like this one. He generally dealt with the corpses of Orochimaru-sama's failed experiments, not those of nameless homicide victims from Otogakure.

Naruto nodded slowly, thinking it over. Kabuto pushed up his glasses, rolling his eyes. "Do you not want to watch, Naruto?"

"No, it's okay. I'll stay."

Kabuto resisted the urge to roll his eyes once more and perhaps remark in a condescending tone _Good boy._

"Alright, let's get started then. Keep in mind, I will be grilling you on everything that you've learned."

"As expected." Kabuto cast him a glance. Was that a shot? Maybe Naruto would do better than he thought with this…

Naruto wandered the library, idly running his finger along the spines at eye level, but really reading the titles from the shelf below. Kabuto was a couple of rows over, apparently looking for volumes of old notes made by distinguished researchers whose names Naruto didn't bother to remember. Naruto paused at a couple of books, twisting his head to read the titles. After a moment, he poked his head out of the end of the row he was in, checking right and left, then he went back. After pulling out one of the books he had been looking at, he went to find Kabuto.

The books and scrolls here did not seem to be organized in any conventional way, but rather in the sorts of grouping that might have been designed for the sake of easy convenience to be navigable by only the one who knew what and where every book was already. Naruto found Kabuto at last, crouched before a shelf with a couple of smaller scrolls and one or two more substantial tomes stacked before him. He was leaning over a book open to near the end, probably browsing the index, Naruto thought.

"Hey Kabuto?" Naruto asked.

"Hm?" Kabuto looked up. "Yes, Naruto?"

"So I was researching blood rituals…"

"Really? Are you still hung up on the autopsy?"

Naruto made a face. "I was kidding. Anyway, I found this book and wondered if you could tell me about it before I read it."

"To lazy to read the preface?"

"Kabuto, you are literally the only person I have ever met who reads the preface to every book. Therefore, you should understand when I say that authors never right anything important in the preface."

"That is not true."

"Nothing _interesting,_ at least."

"Well…"

"Kabuto, don't you dare come up with a counter-example on the spot. Just tell me what this book is about."

Kabuto held out a hand and took the book, flipping it over the check the front cover. "Hm. Jashinism? That's pretty grim reading. Are you sure?"

"It sounds pretty interesting to me," Naruto said defensively.

"Alright, if you're sure. This particular book is one written by a Jashinist, actually, so it will be full of recounts of gory bloodbaths and religious ranting and heretical-sounding declarations of faith. If you're going to read it, I'd suggest reading an outsider's point of view first to brace yourself and get a clearer picture of all of the rituals and images he refers to. Jashinists are immortal, you see, so while the author of _this_book is technically still alive, you may need a syllabus for some of the more arcane or outdated references."

"Okay, thanks." Naruto made to head back, but turned when he caught something. "What? Did you say something?"

"No problem."

"Oh. Okay."

That night when Kabuto entered the observation room adjoining Naruto's, it was to come face-to-face with his employer. "Shall we?" Orochimaru said sweetly, gesturing for Kabuto to precede him out of the room. Kabuto complied and the two were soon ensconced in a lab, looking at each other over Naruto's supine body.

_This is romantic,_ Kabuto thought sarcastically. _Why must he always spring these little sessions on me? Would stripping away his little air of enigma for five seconds really kill him or does his wellbeing actually depend on being such a prima donna? _And then, _It's a damn good thing he can't read minds._

"Which one will it be this time, Orochimaru-sama?" Kabuto asked, the very picture of subservient obedience. "I'd like to state for the record that Naruto has begun researching Jashinism with no prompting whatsoever from me."

"Interesting," Orochimaru said. "And more than likely beneficial. However, It is not the Jashinist's blood that I wish to give to the boy today." Orochimaru withdrew a vial from his pocket, fussily checking the seal and smoothing and rereading the label before handing it over.

Kabuto took the vial, giving it only the cursory glance that it took to recognize the contents. By this time, Kabuto had studied every sample to the point where more than this was not necessary. "Kakuzu," was all he said.

"Correct." Orochimaru paused. After a minute of so, Kabuto glanced up at him.

"Yes, Orochimaru-sama?"

"I am waiting for you to make your usual objections or to attempt to dissuade me from taking this course of action.

Kabuto stared blankly for a moment. Then his eyes widened slightly as he understood. "No! No, Orochimaru-sama, I would never presume to question your judgment."

"And yet you have done so with alarming frequency ever since I put you on this project," Orochimaru murmured. "Don't apologize, Kabuto. I value your input in general, I was simply taken aback that you have nothing to offer on this occasion."

Kabuto simmered. Nothing to _offer?_ If Orochimaru-sama thought that was the case he could very well pull Kabuto from this ridiculous babysitting job. Kabuto would get to stop using his medical jutsu to prevent carpal tunnel from all of the notes he was taking and could get down to some real work. He shook himself a little. _Listen to him. It wouldn't do for him to suspect you of having less-than-loyal thoughts._

Orochimaru was still speaking. "Well, if you have no questions or reservations, I can't pretend it doesn't make a nice change." _You can at least _pretend, Kabuto thought bitterly. "I'll leave you to get on with it," Orochimaru said with a smile. He left. Kabuto resisted the urge to break something, not knowing if he was being monitored or not.

By this point it was a matter of routine to get Naruto's unconscious form situated and primed. Kabuto injected the boy with the infusion. He sat down. He waited for something to happen.

After half an hour or so, Kabuto could sense, like a petrel before the storm, the incoming boredom this day would bring were he not equipped to combat it. To that end, he retrieved a stack of file folders and scrolls, all containing information on Kakuzu of Takigakure. He skimmed the paragraphs. They ranged from accounts of those who had witnessed Kakuzu in action to those who had known him before he went rogue. Mostly these were official reports, however, which was another way of saying that they were virtually devoid of useful information.

It was only when he reached the bit that Orochimaru-sama himself had written during his brief stint as a member of Akatsuki that Kabuto felt an inexplicable sinking feeling. He glanced up at Naruto, who had been twitching for the last fifteen minutes or so, occasional spasms causing him to strain against the restraints. Nothing out of the ordinary. So why did Kabuto get the feeling that he might have just thrown a wrench into the proceedings with this particular infusion?

_Calm down. You always feel like this. A human body is not designed to take all of the strain you put on his. He has borne up well under the pressure so far, why should this be different? Stay calm. Analyze. _Out of habit, Kabuto grabbed a copy of his original predictions. Glancing from them to Naruto, he opened the folder.

He did not even have to flick to the section he wanted before he remembered. _Damn and blast it._ He thought. _Orochimaru-sama may legitimately kill me this time. Kill me and feed me to some sort of hideous fledgling monster._ Shakily, Kabuto ran a hand through his hair before automatically pushing up his glasses.

He washed and dried his hands, pulling on gloves and a face mask. He was moving in a strange hyperaware trance. He kept trying to think about what to do, but nothing was occurring to him. His mind was just a whirling, whining space full of _think, think, think._

He was standing over Naruto, the greenish haze already visible around his hand before he realized that he would not be able to use the chakra scalpels, after all. Naruto's scales would prevent all contact. So Kabuto reached for a blade of steel instead, his anxiety increasing rapidly. It had been a long time since he had actually used a mundane scalpel. It wasn't too different from his chakra scalpels, but there was less control of the blade and right now even that felt really unsettling.

Kabuto carefully cut into Naruto's flesh, making a y-cut from collar bones to sternum and from sternum to diaphragm as he had when he had been dissecting that woman down in the autopsy lab. Kabuto suppressed a shudder. Not that he was adverse to vivisection necessarily, it was essentially akin to surgery, after all, it was just so strange because of how well he knew Naruto by now.

Kabuto set down the scalpel, pulling back one of the flaps he had created, immediately worried when no blood was forthcoming. _No blood._Kabuto hissed at the sight that met him. Under Naruto's skin bunched a network of thick, coarse threads. There were no nerves or veins. No muscles. Naruto's skeleton was virtually unchanged and, after a little poking around, Kabuto found a full set of internal organs, but the fact remained that Naruto's mobility and livelihood was now entirely run on chakra. As Naruto twitched, Kabuto watched certain bundles of the threads bunch and stretch like muscles. He noticed that other threads, perhaps taking the places of veins, were firmly rooted into Naruto's organs, particularly his heart, which still beat, although with what, Kabuto did not know.

_No blood._ Kabuto fitted the flaps back together, not even bothering to thread a needle for stitches, knowing that the cuts would be healed presently. He collapsed into a chair, stripping off the gloves and mask and tossing them into the sink. _How on earth will he be able to use Hidan's abilities when the time comes if he has no blood with which to draw the ritual circle?_

Kabuto put his hands to his face, pushing his glasses up onto his head in order to rub his eyes. _Surely I cannot be blamed for this? The results of these experiments have always been unpredictable. Perhaps this will not be too bad. I just have to make sure not to present this in a bad light. Perhaps the combination of this ability and Hidan's will be more favorable than it seems now._

Kabuto sat for a while, calming down. Finally, his frayed attention span turned wearily to the new abilities themselves. _I wonder if Naruto can do what Kakuzu can do. Can he absorb hearts? I cannot try it though, what if he notices that he has two heartbeats? The results would be quite distressing._

Kabuto stood and began to pace. _When we spar in the future, not only must I be sure that I do not perform jutsu on him, I must also be sure not to cut his skin. If his chakra reserves weren't so grotesquely enormous and had he not the Kyuubi in him, he might not have had enough chakra to sustain himself at this point. However, as things stand, simply moving around will most likely work as an exercise to increase his reserves even further. Perhaps this, in addition to Kakuzu's immortality technique will be enough to placate Orochimaru-sama. Seriously, this whole Kakuzu's-power-impeding-Hidan's smacks of something that would actually be orchestrated by those two. Not that I think they planned this or even were aware of this little experiment. I'm not that paranoid._

On the table, Naruto thrashed, the wounds nearly healed but his sleeping mind a whirl of disturbing images.

Naruto felt an unpleasant tugging sensation in his chest. He raised his head. He was lying on an operating table. Kabuto was standing over him, that deadly green haze surrounding his hand. There was blood splattered across it as Kabuto raised it out of the way. Naruto looked down at his own chest. He tried to scream, but he had no lungs. There were snakes, long and sinuous sliding out of the hole Kabuto had cut in him. He looked up at the older boy, planning to ask why he would do it, but he couldn't breathe, couldn't make a sound.

Then he saw the threads, connecting to Kabuto's hands and head, forcing the scalpel down toward Naruto while Kabuto's lifeless glass eyes stared eerily. Naruto craned his head, trying to see who was pulling the strings, but the man was in Kabuto's shadow. Naruto felt something sharp prick his cheek. He turned his head and met a pair of slit-pupiled orange eyes and the madman's scribble of a snarl.

The dream popped like a soap bubble and Naruto sat up, shaking and panting. For a minute he could still remember the dream, but when he did not rush to write down the details, they faded and he was left cold and disturbed but none the wiser.

He smoothed his hands down his chest momentarily, puzzled by the lingering feelings of constriction. He was back in his bedroom, the mirrored glass on one side and the desk bearing his notes on the other.

When Kabuto eventually came in, he found Naruto slumped at his desk, idly doodling battle-puppets bristling with fanciful weapons and sporting the faces of people he knew.

"Hm," was all Orochimaru said.

Kabuto knelt before him, the back of his neck prickling with sweat and a finger rammed across his nose to hold up his glasses.

"No blood, you say? And his organs are being run entirely on chakra?"

"Yes, Orochimaru-sama."

"And you find this a concern because you do not think that I will not have blood to spill for the sake of a Jashinist ritual?"

Kabuto hesitated. "Yes, Orochimaru-sama," he said finally.

"Even though one's body changes to reflect one's opponent's body when in the Cursed State?"

Kabuto frowned for a moment. "I… I did not know that, Orochimaru-sama."

Orochimaru rolled his eyes. "This hardly seems to be a cause for concern, Kabuto. One way or another I will be immortal, rest assured."

"I have no doubt, Orochimaru-sama."

"Then act like it. This is my plan and it will not fail," he snapped.

"Of course, Orochimaru-sama."

"Then, if you have no more objections, you are dismissed."

"Kaa-sensei?" Naruto fiddled with the paper before him.

Kushina smiled. "Yes, Naruto?"

"Where do you come from?"

Kushina gave Naruto a long look, frantically reviewing Kabuto's original instructions in her head. "It's a pretty boring story," she said slowly. "Are you sure you want to hear it?"

Naruto shook his head impatiently. "That's what adults say when they don't want to tell me something," he said. "I bet it's a good story."

"Well…"

"Will you tell it to me?"

Kushina glanced at the tinted window, impassive as ever. She thought quickly. As long as she did not mention Konoha or the Kyuubi, she would technically not be disobeying Kabuto's instructions. She took a careful breath. "If it's a story you want…" she muttered. "I was born in Uzushiogakure."

Naruto looked faintly puzzled. "Whirlpool? I've never even heard of it."

"You wouldn't have," Kushina said, each word rolling off her tongue and falling with a great heaviness into the stark quiet of the room. "It was destroyed some time before you were born."


	7. Chapter 6

"Your village was destroyed? I didn't know that could happen."

"That's because you grew up in a large village, rather than a small one. I mean, Uzushio was small, but it was pretty powerful and influential as small villages go," Kushina said.

"Who destroyed it?"

"Iwa and Kumo teamed up."

"Wow." Naruto stared at Kushina. "Do you resent them at all?"

"Not really. It was before the start of the Third Great Shinobi War, quite a long time ago. Don't get me wrong, I grieved for my village and hated the attackers, but I wouldn't hold a grudge with members of Iwa and Kumo who are blameless in that respect."

Naruto nodded. "I think I understand. Did you- I mean, what was it like in Uzushio?"

Kushina shrugged. "I don't remember much. My last few months there didn't exactly make for good memories. Neither did the several ensuing years as I settled into my new home."

"Why not? What happened?"

"I was picked on a lot by other kids, and I didn't do much to encourage friendships. I used to beat up the kids who picked on me."

"Why did they pick on you?" Kushina hesitated for the briefest moment.

"Mostly because of my red hair. I used to hate it and hate the people who made fun of me for it."

"You used to?"

Kushina sighed. "There was a boy-" she broke off. Naruto was grinning madly. "Stop that," Kushina said, her irritation slightly marred by the affection in her voice. "It wasn't like that."

"It sure _sounds_ like it was like that," Naruto said, still grinning.

"Only here's the thing, it wasn't," Kushina said. She took a deep breath. "The truth is, I didn't even like him at first. I though he was such a sissy that he would never make a good ninja. And on top of that, I felt like he was lying or copying me when he said that he wanted to grow up to be Kage."

"Why, was that your dream, too?"

"Yes."

"Did it work?" Kushina gazed at Naruto's rapt face.

"Not yet it hasn't, but it's only a matter of time."

"Alright, go on, what about this boy? What did he look like, anyway?" Kushina absently ran a hand through Naruto's hair, but he shook it off impatiently. "You're stalling," he whined.

"He looked a little like you, I guess. Blonde. Blue-eyed," Kushina said. The words were quiet, but she was proud that her voice did not shake._After all this time… _"In any case, I was a genin when it happened, just barely graduated. I was kidnapped by shinobi from Kumo."

"Geez, you just couldn't catch a break. What did they want you for?"

"Something about my chakra, I think."

"How did you escape?"

"What makes you think I escaped? He, the boy I was telling you about, he followed me. He tracked me by the strands of my hair that had fallen while the shinobi carried me, and when the time came, he rescued me."

"I bet you didn't hate your hair so much then," Naruto said.

"I still would have done if he hadn't told me he thought it was beautiful."

Naruto let out a sigh of the sort one gives at the end of a good story. "And the two of you lived happily ever after?"

"For a few years, yes."

Naruto frowned. "What's that supposed to mean? Where is he, anyway?"

Kushina swallowed. "He's dead, Naruto," she said softly. "He was killed the day our son was born."

Naruto looked alarmed. What kind of a happy ending was that? "Where's your son?"

"That day- that day, he disappeared. I searched for months, but I never found him, never heard what became of him."

"So you stopped looking? Just gave up?" Naruto sounded like he was trying to hide his anger, but it wasn't working, spilling over and making his words shake slightly.

"Of course not. I have kept an ear out ever since, investigating anything that sounds like him. But my life moved on, and I bet his has, too. He grew up without me, and I doubt he'd want me in his life now."

"I doubt it," Naruto said quietly. "As one who grew up without parents, I can say that if your son is any sort of a reasonable guy, he wants to meet you as much as you do him."

Kushina met Naruto's eyes, and for a moment, it looked like his heart was breaking. She knew that she could look little better. Wordlessly, she pulled him into a hug.

"At least we found each other," Naruto said thickly.

Kabuto stared through the window, disgusted. What was this? Kushina had been instructed to teach Naruto fuinjutsu, not let him waste time crying on her shoulder about how horrible their childhoods were. Kabuto wasn't even the least bit grateful that Kushina at least had the decency not to mention Minato's name, the Kyuubi, or Konoha. He knew she had lied a little when she spoke about always searching for her son. Kushina had been locked up in these labs since shortly after the Kyuubi attack.

He wondered what it felt like to lie to your son, a boy, moreover, who had just confessed to missing you without realizing it.

Kabuto was slightly unsettled when Orochimaru approached him next, talking as if it was time to administer another injection. It had been a scant two and a half weeks since the last one, and Kabuto pointed out that Naruto's body, while now entirely adjusted to the addition of Kakuzu's threads, could probably use a more significant rest.

Orochimaru stared at him, eyes narrowed. "You just said that he had completely adjusted. You even told me that his chakra reserves are vast and growing daily to account for the amount he uses each day just to move and survive. What objection could you possibly have?"

Kabuto hesitated. "Which sample were you considering on this occasion?" he asked at last.

In response, Orochimaru held up two vials. Kabuto recognized one but the other was a mystery to him. It was the mixture he had been asked to make of the blonde hairs Orochimaru had gathered the day he had fled from the other had bits of red hair.

"is that"

Kushinas DNA will boast the boys fuinjutsu to greater heights

Because Orochimaru had not had the time to study the abilities of that boy when they had made their brief 'acquaintance', Kabuto had been forced to do more research on this sample than usual. It had taken him a while to find information on the jealously guarded Iwagakure kinjutsu that was responsible for the mouths on the boy's hands. The jutsu was said to allow the user to knead chakra into materials, raw, malleable materials being the most effective, like clay.

From the information Kabuto had found suggested that the boy must have been at least a former member of the Explosion Corps, meaning that he probably possessed the Bakuton Kekkei Genkai, a bloodline that allowed those who possessed it to cause objects they came into contact with to explode.

Although giving Naruto the DNA would most likely not give him the mouths on his hands without the special kinjutsu to go with it, Kabuto still had misgivings about handing Naruto, who was in essence a prisoner and an experiment to boot, the ability to make things explode. _Who am I kidding? He can do that with exploding tags anyway. This way is just faster and a little more dangerous._

While the research had not made Kabuto feel better about administering such a potentially destructive ability, it did give him an idea about how to train Naruto to use it without alerting him to the fact that Kabuto was performing horrible human genetic experiments on him. After all, Naruto didn't have to know that the kinjutsu was not responsible for allowing him to make explosions. Also, if Kabuto played his cards right, he would be able to kill two birds with one stone and teach Naruto about two of his abilities without raising suspicion.

Kabuto moved to administer the injection, hesitating a moment before injecting it into one of Naruto's tenketsu. Kabuto was no Hyuuga, but he was an accomplished medic already and could at least identify a few major tenketsu. He figured that without veins to inject, he could at least make sure that the liquid would be spread by the boy's chakra flow. The Kyuubi would have to deal with regulating it from there.

"So what you're saying is that this new jutsu will give me mouths on the palms of my hands? That doesn't seem physically possible."

Kabuto smiled patronizingly, knowing that it would annoy Naruto. "If you do not want to, I will understand, Naruto. I just thought you would like the little side effect of this jutsu allowing you to explode things…"

"So, about this jutsu, how does one go about performing it?"

Kabuto allowed himself a rare smirk, going through the hand signs with Naruto. Kabuto himself was not going to implement the jutsu. Orochimaru had not given him specific orders to this end, but he got the feeling that his employer would be less than pleased were he to possess Naruto only to find that Kabuto could use the same techniques as he could. It was a superiority complex thing, and Kabuto preferred not to screw around with it.

Naruto was successful, easily implementing the jutsu after only a few repetitions of the complex hand seals. He raised his hands, staring at the gaping slashes. "I thought you said that they would look more like mouths," he said.

Kabuto's smile fell. "Excuse me?" He took one of Naruto's hands and examined the opening. By all accounts, it should have resembled a mouth, with a full set of teeth and a tongue. Instead, it was more like a two-inch-long slit in the skin, which a bit of probing forced open, revealing a sort of muscular sac. It would probably work as these things normally did, kneading chakra into whatever material was placed inside, but Kabuto figured that either the Kyuubi's interference or the atypical nature of Naruto's physical makeup caused the jutsu to yield the unusual results. Better not to tell Naruto that.

Kabuto reluctantly released Naruto's hand, thinking quickly. "I exaggerated slightly when I described the effects as looking like 'mouths'," he said.

"Okay," Naruto said slowly, in a way that meant he probably wasn't more than half-listening. He was intent on opening and closing the slits on his palms without touching them. It seemed to get easier and easier the longer he practiced.

Kabuto rapped the table impatiently. "Pay attention, Naruto. The jutsu will allow you to knead your chakra into substances, shape the substances into whatever is the most effective form is for your purpose at the moment, and then make the materials explode. For now, practice with this." Kabuto passed Naruto a small amount of clay.

Naruto took it, the clay immediately disappearing into the slit across his right palm. Naruto's face took on a look of concentration. "So you're saying that the chakra-infusion should work automatically?" He extracted the clay a minute later. It looked the same, but when Naruto set a small amount on the floor and made the seal that Kabuto had shown him, it blew up, leaving nothing but the faint smell of burning and scorch marks on the floor. Naruto grinned. "This is so cool."

"Why don't you try to shape the clay inside of your hands while it is being infused with chakra?" Kabuto suggested.

For a while Naruto experimented, forming coils and cubes and pyramids. Each time, the different shapes caused different blast patterns, and sooner or later, Naruto began to talk about using explosions to launch or redirect projectiles, about how it would only take a few well-placed smaller explosions to bring down a wall that most would need a larger explosion to destroy.

Finally, Kabuto took out a stack of paper and scrolls. "The jutsu works on more than just clay, Naruto."

"Really?" Naruto asked, tearing his eyes away from the little model clay puppet he was playing with. He was testing if he could control it without chakra strings if the entire thing was infused with he chakra, anyway.

Kabuto pushed a sheet of paper toward Naruto. "Try this."

Naruto made a face. "Why do I need to use this to blow up paper? It would be far more efficient and precise to use an exploding seal. That way, I know for sure how large the explosions will be."

"I think you are missing part of the point of this, Naruto. It's not just about the explosions. It's also about putting your chakra into objects. Try putting it into this sheet of paper."

Naruto dubiously folded it into the slit in his palm. After a few seconds he made a face again and dropped it onto the table. He and Kabuto looked at it. Naruto giggled and Kabuto shot him a look.

"What?" Kabuto asked.

"I made a paper snowball," Naruto said.

Kabuto sighed, exasperated. "Maybe I should have given you the scrolls first."

"Scrolls? What scrolls?" Kabuto pushed them across the table. Naruto unrolled one. "Origami?"

"Think about it, if infusing paper with your chakra means that you can control it, it could have endless uses."

"Okay, if you say so." Naruto still seemed skeptical, but he took another sheet of paper as he pored over the scrolls, looking for a suitable form to begin with.

"So what's this idea of yours?" Kushina asked, bemused. Naruto had shown her the 'mouths' on the palms of his hands and explained what the jutsu allowed him to do.

"Well, since you taught me sealing from the ground up, showing me the different parts and limiters, I was thinking about the components of seals themselves."

Kushina nodded encouragingly. "Go on, this sounds promising."

"I was wondering if there might be a way, particularly with this new jutsu, for me to edit seals that how already been completed."

"How do you propose to do that?"

Naruto took a sheet of paper. "Here, I'll put my chakra into this so that I can show you. I haven't tried it before, so it's just theoretical at this point."

Kushina watched as Naruto put chakra into the paper before taking up a pen and drawing a simple exploding seal. Naruto grinned at her before carefully setting the tip of the pen to the pad of his left index finger, quickly drawing a small seal and duplicating it on the tips of the other four fingers of his left hand.

He set down the pen and explained. "You see, having my chakra in the paper I'm working on probably doesn't make a difference because it's my chakra in the seal anyway. If this works, I'm going to try with a seal that has your chakra rather than mine. Now, I designed the seals that I drew on my fingertips to allow me to alter the physical make-up, and therefore the purpose, of a seal when I channel chakra through them. If this entire thing works, I am going to ask Kabuto if I can tattoo them on, like the training weight seals, maybe with invisible ink, too, on all ten fingers."

"Alright, you sound like you know what you're doing," Kushina said with a grin. Honestly, she had never heard of someone trying this before. "Show me."

Naruto channeled chakra to the seals, lowering his index finger to the paper and carefully sliding it along. As Kushina watched, the seal began to change, lines dividing or changing, thinning out when more ink was required elsewhere in the design. It seemed as though the changes responded more to Naruto's will than anything, although he did occasionally make some of the changes by sliding one piece over the another place with the tip of his finger. When he finished, Kushina recognized the product as a basic storage seal. It had none of Naruto's clever variations applied to it, so it was unmistakable.

Kushina picked up a spare scroll, glancing at Naruto for permission. "May I?"

He gestured for her to go ahead, practically grinning from ear to ear and flushed at his success. Kushina made a handsign and pushed the scroll into the storage seal. It worked just as it should have, the scroll vanishing. Kushina picked up the paper, noting how the weight of the paper had not changed at all and the seal looked to be perfectly crafted.

Kushina smiled. "This is an amazing achievement. I've never known anyone else to so much as think of trying something like this."

Naruto beamed. "Thanks, Kaa-sensei. If you don't mind, I'd like to try with one of your seals, something that wasn't drawn using my chakra. I need to see if I can alter someone else's seal without infusing the paper with my chakra."

As it turned out, with some experimentation, Naruto _did_ end up needing to infuse the paper in order to alter Kushina's seals. It was hardly a setback, Kushina said, and Naruto didn't feel too bad about it.

When Naruto showed Kabuto, he agreed to let Naruto tattoo the seals onto his fingertips with invisible ink, letting Naruto do the ones on his left hand. Naruto mistrustfully allowed Kabuto to do the ones on his right hand after Kabuto pointed out that Naruto could always edit the seals of Kabuto made a mistake. Kabuto didn't make a mistake, as it happened, but Naruto checked over his work, going through one by one, looking for mistakes.

In order to edit Kabuto's work, Naruto just channeled chakra to the tips of his fingers, that being enough to allow the seals on his left hand to work.

Kabuto cautioned Naruto against tampering with the weight seals, placating him by allowing him to raise them one setting and reminding him that he still had to work on his taijutsu practice for the day.

Kabuto had persisted in occasionally bringing Naruto along on autopsies to keep both of them from getting bored. As time went on, Naruto would help out, handing Kabuto a tool now and then when the chakra scalpels weren't enough. Naruto would talk, too, making observations, and Kabuto usually took the time to explain what he was doing to Naruto, going through medical procedures with him and showing him which pieces of physical evidence showed what about how the person lived or died.

Kabuto had refrained from showing Naruto any of the failed members from Orochimaru's experiments, in case Naruto should wonder where the unusual symptoms came from. Kabuto had stuck with showing Naruto only those who had died in Otogakure, most of them shinobi, but with the odd civilian thrown in. This time was slightly different, however. Kabuto really had to get some work done, and while civilian deaths were all well and good, his employer cared more about why his experiments were dying than why his villagers were.

So Kabuto watched Naruto out of the corner of his eye all the while that he was dissecting the newest corpse. Naruto's eyes kept straying to the man's shoulder. Sometimes Naruto would frown, crane is neck a little better to get a better view, and then subside, looking annoyed. Finally, Kabuto let the green haze fade from his hands, licking dry lips.

"What's bothering you, Naruto?"

Naruto looked up from gazing at the man's exposed rib cage. "What?"

"You're clearly bothered by something. What is it? I thought you were over your distaste for autopsies."

"I am," Naruto said quickly. "It's just… that seal on his shoulder…" He wrinkled his nose in distaste.

"What about it?" Kabuto asked, keeping his voice steady.

"It's… it's just so poorly designed!" Naruto burst out. "What was this guy thinking, putting something like this on himself? There are one or two parts that I don't understand, but he was clearly too heavy-handed with some of these limiters. I can only assume that he was going for enhanced strength and speed, but he ended up overtaxing his heart and muscles way too quickly, not to mention his brain-! He must have died painfully." Naruto stopped. Kabuto was watching him. "I can stop…" Naruto said awkwardly.

"No, it's okay," Kabuto said quickly. "This is interesting. How would you change it?"

"Well, since you ask," Naruto said stripped off the rubber gloves he wore. He channeled chakra to his fingertips, lowering his right hand to touch the seal on the man's shoulder. He frowned, remembering that he could not change a seal that was not written on a surface infused with his chakra. Instead, he covered the entire seal with his palm, the edges of the 'mouth' there contracting and expanding around the skin on which the seal was written to work chakra into the cold skin. When Naruto was satisfied, he went back to work with his fingers, the shape of the seal slowly emerging under his ministrations. After a minute of silent concentration, Naruto removed his hand, pulling the gloves back on.

"That's how I would change it," Naruto said. "Or at least, I left the parts I didn't recognize alone, just moved them around a little. In any case, that would have taken care of the other parts." Naruto stared at the seal for a moment before giving a grim smile. "Too bad I was too late."

_Maybe not as late as you think,_ Kabuto thought.

Orochimaru considered the sketches that Kabuto had drawn and the notes about the changes Naruto had made. "And he said that the seal was overtaxing their muscles, heart, and brain? You're sure?"

"Yes, Orochimaru-sama."

"Thank Kami my design happened to offend the boy's delicate sense of craftsmanship," Orochimaru said dryly. "Maybe now I can get somewhere with this project."

"Keep in mind that there were parts that he did not edit," Kabuto said quickly. If this draft failed as badly as all of the others, Kabuto did not want to be accused of withholding vital information of the changes Naruto had made.

"Yes, I can see that," Orochimaru said, standing up, notes in hand. "You are dismissed, Kabuto. This is good work."

Kabuto hesitated slightly before standing up to leave. Orochimaru never let any of his lab assistants watch him work. The labs were Orochimaru's domains and he was just paranoid to want to be the only one to oversee all. Kabuto left, quietly closing the door and pausing outside just long enough to hear the lock click.

"Watch this," Naruto said with a grin. He opened his hand and a paper crane lifted from his palm, flapping around the room. Kabuto gave a smile of encouragement.

"Very good, Naruto."

Naruto ignored the patronizing tone. Or he didn't hear it. Sometimes it was hard for Kabuto to differentiate when Naruto was excited.

"That's not all I can do, I've just been trying to figure out if I can apply this paper thing to puppets. For some reason, I have more control over paper than I do with other substances. After all, I can make anything explode as long as it's the least bit pliant so that I can put chakra into it, but not everything I put chakra into moves as easily as paper. Maybe because it's so light?"

"Maybe," Kabuto agreed. He didn't cross his fingers. Mad scientists did not cross their fingers when they lied. _Mad scientist? Really? Could I be more melodramatic?_ "What were you saying about using paper to augment your puppets?" Kabuto asked quickly.

Naruto shook his head. "That's the thing, unless I'm facing an opponent who's afraid of paper cuts, I don't see how this will be helpful in battle."

Kabuto thought for a moment. "Have you considered combining it with genjutsu instead?" He asked. "After all, you've already used it to augment your sealing."

"True, and no, I haven't tried."

"Then you ought to get on that."

"Can I practice genjutsu on you?"

"No."

"Please?"

"No."

"Pleeeeeaaaaaaasssssseeee?"

"_No_, Naruto."

Naruto heaved a sigh. "_Fine_, I guess if you're determined to make this _no fun_ there's no stopping you."

Kabuto brooded. Once again, Orochimaru-sama was ignoring his dire warnings, rushing things along far too quickly. It had been a scant month since Naruto had been given Deidara's DNA infusion, but Orochimaru, his judgment slightly clouded, though Kabuto would never say as much aloud, by the impending release from his current skin, had decided that he could not put off the next infusion any longer.

Kabuto, for one, was at a loss as to how he was supposed to hide it if Naruto's hair turned silver. He supposed he could always dye it, but Kushina would notice and ask Naruto about it. All Kabuto could hope for was that Naruto's body would not be altered any more than it already had been. That Naruto would become immortal and that was all. Hopefully it would not actually be necessary for Naruto to believe in the pagan god Jashin for the immortality to take affect. That was straying into the world of religious fanatics, and Kabuto already had to deal with one too many fanatics in his life, thank you very much.

As it had been such a success that last time, Kabuto repeated the injection procedure, emptying the syringe of the Jashinist's blood into one of Naruto's tenketsu.

Kabuto allowed a good number of hours to pass before testing the abilities. For this purpose, Orochimaru had 'donated' a good pint of blood from one of the prisoners down in the cells who was slated for execution and/or punishment. Kabuto did not know which prisoner it was. He had not asked. Orochimaru had not told him.

Kabuto dripped a little of the blood across Naruto's lips, holding a hand over his mouth rubbing his throat to make him swallow. The effect was apparent almost at once. Naruto's skin turned black as pitch, with paper-white stripes standing out against the black. Kabuto had drawn out the correct diagram in the blood of the prisoner on the table before placing Naruto over it in the first place, so he need not have worried about that.

Kabuto surrounded his hand in the comforting green glow of a chakra scalpel, lowering it until it was six inches from Naruto's skin. He hesitated. Would Naruto's scales prevent jutsu from coming into contact with him in this state? Only one way to find out. He lowered he hand, just barely grazing the inside of Naruto's wrist enough so that a bright well of blood seeped from the point of contact. Kabuto let out the breath he hadn't known he was holding.

It seemed that Orochimaru had been right, that the cursed state had caused Naruto's body to revert to one of flesh and blood. Kabuto watched, waiting for the injury to heal. When it didn't, he rubbed out a section of the diagram. The state was broken and Naruto's skin resumed its usual color. The injury dwindled and disappeared within the minute, and when Kabuto passed a healing jutsu over Naruto's skin, he felt the reassuring prickle of the boy's scales sucking away at it.

Kabuto sat down, pulling out a clipboard. He had gotten into the habit of not waking Naruto from these drug-induced comas until he had finished marking down all information. The logic being that questions occasionally came up while Kabuto was in the process of writing his reports and it would be very poor outlook indeed if Naruto was not already sedated and strapped down for Kabuto to pursue those queries.

Kabuto scribbled furiously- he would go back and rewrite any shorthand afterwards. Orochimaru would get the revised copy and Kabuto would keep the original notes.

At this juncture, Kabuto caught himself looking vacantly at Naruto, restrained and unconscious. Kabuto glanced back at his notes, frowning a little. Unfortunately, he could not test whether the Jashinist's DNA actually ensured Naruto's immortality. As much as his fingers itch to reach down and just sever Naruto's windpipe- one slice, he was on so much morphine he wouldn't even feel it- he was on strict orders to do nothing the sort.

Even if this exercise in immortality did not succeed and Naruto was still as mortal as he was from the start, he would still be a marvel, absolutely unique. Orochimaru would inhabit him for as long as was humanly possible, and if it turned out that he was flawed, that he could die, they could not risk killing him before absolutely forced to that conclusion by circumstance. Naruto might or might not have been immortal, and unless they were one-hundred percent certain that he was, they could not test and make one-hundred percent sure. In case he wasn't. Catch-twenty-two.

Kabuto raised his head to gaze meditatively at the boy strapped to the lab bench. An experiment. Less than human, but if this all worked, so much more and so, so worth it.


	8. Chapter 7

_Naruto looked around. He was alone. Or, not quite alone. He could tell he was being studied. Judged. Not chased, though. Observed. As though the chase had already happened and he had lost, _they_ had caught him. Whoever _they_ were._

_Naruto blinked. His feet were wet. He could tell because his shoes were gone, his feet bare and cold. _They_ had taken his shoes so that he couldn't run._

_Naruto held a hand up in front of his face. Blood dripped from it. In fact, blood poured from both of his hands, splattering his pale, cold feet. It was not his though, oh no. It was someone… else's. Someone he knew? Liked? Respected?_

_A voice whispered to him. He did not jump, but his heart raced, thundered, echoed until it was hard to breathe, think, see, hear. But he still heard the voice. It was _their_ voice._

_'There is blood on your hands.'_

_Naruto was panicking now. He wiped his hands down the front of his shirt, but they left brilliant red smears without cleaning his hands off one bit. They were just as soiled, bloody, tainted. He was doing nothing more than painting a target on himself._

_The voice came once more. 'There is blood on your hands and it will never, ever come off.'_

Naruto woke up cold, so cold, with his heart still hammering.

"No offensive jutsu. Are you ready, Naruto?"

Naruto looked a bit exasperated. "What kind of opponent is going to ask me if I'm ready to fight?"

Kabuto shoved his glasses up, giving Naruto a cold, blank look. "I'll take that as a yes." Kabuto dove forward, fist drawn in close, snapping out for a punch. Naruto shunshined and Kabuto immediately dropped into a crouch, searching for him. _Where-?_

Naruto took careful aim and tossed a kunai down from the ceiling. Kabuto looked up and was just in time to whip out his own knife and slash the incoming one aside. Naruto watched Kabuto's stroke come around, make contact with the handle of his knife- bingo.

It exploded. To Naruto's credit he had only used a mildly concussive design, one with a loud noise and flash, a lot of smoke, but no real damage. He dropped down behind the older boy, silently kneeling behind Kabuto and withdrawing a coil of wire. Just as he reached forward to wind the wire around Kabuto's ankles, a foot came out of the cloying smoke, missing Naruto's fingers and instead getting him full in the face.

Naruto let out an involuntary gasp as white stars exploded in his vision. He knew they would last only moments, but he couldn't afford moments. He kawirimied, hoping that Kabuto might stumble over the resultant log in the smoke. He was on the wall now, near the ceiling as he nursed a probably broken nose. He dimly wondered why there was no blood, but was more focused withdrawing a scroll from the loop on his belt. From the scroll he unsealed a puppet, wooden, rudimentary, and heavier than he would have liked, but still perfectly functional.

The smoke below seemed to have thinned out somewhat with the movement of air associated with his kawirimi. The chakra strings fell into place almost naturally as he directed the puppet below. He remembered to allow for the difference in gravitational direction between his perch and his puppet's position.

Teeth gritted in a grin of concentration, he used the puppet to lead Kabuto on a furious, merry dance, hidden blade slicing out to just miss snagging Kabuto's clothes or scratching his glasses. The puppet couldn't lay a finger on the older boy, no matter how skillfully it was manipulated.

Naruto pressed on, mind racing with angle projections and ideas to act on later, when Kabuto allowed him time to reflect in the aftermath. To anyone he would have seemed completely preoccupied. So when he felt the cold, tingling press of a blade against his throat and stilled, it seemed as though he barely noticed his now-stationary puppet being torn to shreds on the floor below.

"Got you," Kabuto's voice said triumphantly.

"You too." It was Kabuto's turn to stop, feeling a knife at his throat. Naruto, the one in front of Kabuto, severed the chakra strings connected to his fingers and twisted around, smiling.

"I knew you were there, Kabuto," said the Naruto in front of the silver-haired boy.

Kabuto frowned a little. "I'll concede," he said, "but only for the purpose of instruction. You should not let a clone cover me like this." With that he dispelled the Naruto that held a knife to his throat.

"How did you know that one was the clone? I would have though you'd assume that the clone would be the distraction and I would be threatening you myself."

Kabuto straightened, what would have been an interesting sight to one not used to walking on walls. "I would have assumed just that, was I not sure that you were the one I punched earlier."

Naruto ruefully prodded his nose. The swelling had almost entirely gone down already, but it still hurt. He forgot to wonder once more why it wasn't bloody. "Why did you concede and let me win instead of calling the fight when you had the knife to my throat?" he asked.

"Because I knew you still had a clone in reserve, and wanted to see what you would do with it," Kabuto said smoothly.

Naruto narrowed his eyes, but dropped to the floor, walking over to inspect his broken puppet instead of answering. That answer had fallen just a little _too_ freely from Kabuto's lips. Because it was the truth? Or because he had already come up with an excuse not to hurt Naruto? It hadn't escaped the boy's notice that Kabuto had been going much easier on him. Oh sure, he was giving his just as much work and making him train just as hard, but in spars he had been conceding far more readily than usual, apparently reluctant to do Naruto much damage. He had not been using jutsu on Naruto, had been pulling his punches.

Naruto surreptitiously touched his nose once more, chasing what last tingling sensations of pain that remained, but the break had already healed, whole and straight.

Naruto flicked at one of the joints of his newest puppet model. This one was much lighter than what he was used to, it's frame covered in toughened leather rather than wood. One of the joints was giving him grief, however, and it had gotten to the point where he had removed it from the frame to look at it closely.

Absently, he reached for a soldering tool, but found the movement arrested by an unfamiliar object. He looked up, following the hand and arm connected to the object and found the familiar round frames and slightly-false smile of Kabuto.

"You shouldn't be using a thing like that without wearing a pair of goggles."

Naruto waved this away. "I'm careful."

"Everyone thinks they are careful, but those who are prepared don't get hurt when they eventually forget to take precautions."

Naruto snorted, turning the troublesome piece of metal over in his hands. "What, you want me to wear those goggles all of the time?" He spared the offending article a glance. "They're welding goggles, they'd impede my peripheral vision."

Kabuto sighed, frustrated. "It's a gift, Naruto. Just do me a favor and keep them with you. Wear them on your forehead- I don't care. Just keep them with you to remind you that you won't live forever and you need to remember to be careful."

"I'm not the little kid I was when I came here, Kabuto."

That seemed to, amazingly, catch Kabuto off guard. "No," he finally conceded, "You're not." He hurried away, leaving the goggles on the bench.

Naruto hesitated before taking them, snapping them on over his eyes before taking the soldering tool up.

Later he would forget to take them off, pushing them up onto his forehead as he ate.

Kabuto came into Kushina's cell, quiet as ever. He seemed distracted, giving Kushina a chance to scrape dirt over the seal designs she had been scratching in the floor before Kabuto noticed.

"Yes sweetheart?" she asked brightly, disguising the fact that her pulse was racing, scared that she had nearly been caught planning. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

Kabuto ran a hand through his hair, clearly flustered, ill-at-ease, twisting the end of his ponytail around a finger, before sighing, settling himself on the floor and crossing his arms tightly over his chest, knees drawn right up.

"You know, I bet even the Big Man would understand the concept of 'No means no,' Kabuto," Kushina snarked.

Kabuto honest-to-god _glared_ at her. "I highly doubt it, even if I'm positive that we're not thinking of the same situations."

"Well, what situation are you talking about?" Kushina bit out, "The one where the Big Man has you perform illicit experiments on my son?" Kushina barely reigned in her anger. There was no need to accidentally make Naruto's situation worse.

And just like that, it looked like Kabuto was completely in control again. He sat up, legs crossed, and pushed up his glasses, face impassive. "First of all, Orochimaru is in charge of more of the land around here than you know, so anything he's doing isn't illegal by his own law."

"It's _disgusting_, it's _inhumane_ and I won't let him continue," Kushina snarled.

Kabuto pointedly rolled his eyes. "_Second_ly, what are you talking about?"

"Don't play stupid with me, not when you do a wonderful job without pretending." Kushina hissed. "Naruto showed me that 'technique' you taught him. What is it? A drug?"

Kabuto blinked at her, just the slightest bit taken aback. "You're upset about _that_? He laughed a harsh, grating sound. "You have no idea, do you? What Naruto showed you, those mouths- that really _is _a jutsu."

Kushina's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean? What else have you done to him?" As Kabuto shook his head, a nasty grin breaking through his mock-sorrowful air. She snapped "_Tell me._"

"You've seen him and you've heard him," Kabuto retorted. "We aren't giving him anything anyone- anything _he_ wouldn't want. He's happy because we're giving him knowledge and power. Not that it will matter to you for long. Not that it will matter to him, either."

"What are you planning? What's Orochimaru planning?"

"Me?" Kabuto spread his hands jeeringly. "I'm not planning to do anything that I haven't already done to him."

"Clarify." There was a pleading note in Kushina's voice, and Kabuto wondered at her acting ability. There was no way this low level of psychological torture was doing anything to the likes of her. Then again, this was her son they were discussing….

Kabuto leaned in, letting the smile drop easily from his face. "Alright, Kushina. I'll tell you a secret." He glanced around conspiratorially. "I've been lying to your son. Lying about you, and me, and him. He believes me of course. Why wouldn't he? Not like he ever had a mentor figure before I came along." Kushina's eyes flashed with something Kabuto didn't catch, but he let it pass.

"I told him what my master wants him to hear. I recounted the past Orochimaru fabricated for me, instead of the truth. Which is that I'm such a good spy that my own mother didn't recognize me when she was sent to kill me." Kabuto tried to hold back the bitter note in his voice, but gave up, letting the words pour forth.

"My mother made me everything I was. She gave me a home and a family when I was an orphan. She gave me these glasses when I couldn't see, she gave me a name so that I could speak and have the words belong to me, she gave me standards and a sense of duty and loyalty. My master? He gave me a way to avenge her. And I took it. Do you think your son will do the same for you?"

Kushina did not speak. Kabuto went on, voice heavy with memories. "I haven't been home for years. Neither has Naruto. Neither have you. Somehow, I don't think any of us are going to make it out of here the same as when we came." He reached out and flicked her handcuffs. "Particularly those of us who will be leaving feet first in a coffin, Kushina-sama."

She found her voice. "You don't know what it's like to lose a child," she said quietly.

"No," Kabuto conceded, "But I know what it's like to lose yourself- I've felt it twice, in fact. And I can tell you, it's not a bunch of laughs." He stood up, dusting himself down. " Look at it this way," he said briskly, "at least he has allies. I don't want him to get hurt, although that impulse is against my better judgment. Lord knows you don't want him to get hurt. Although how you can want that, when you lie to him as much as I do, I may never know. However, just understand this: he is happy. Despite everything, your son is happy here, and may very well be happy up until the point when we're ready for him. When we finish what we've started. So do him a favor. Don't make his and your last memories of him feeling trapped and wronged and all that. Considering, his life could be much worse right now. At least he has you. And me."

Orochimaru scratched absently at this skin. It was starting to come apart. There were only three or four months left before he could be rid of this nuisance. Before he would able to slip into a skin much better tailored for his plans. Months of preparation, of diverting his restless excitement into project after project, would finally be realized.

He steadied himself. No need to get too emotional. What were a few months when he would soon have eternity?

Automatically, he reached for the vial that he had selected to be next. When his questing fingers didn't find it, he could admit this to himself, here in private; he may have been slightly concerned for a moment. His heartbeat _may_ have elevated for a moment or two.

Maybe.

Before he remembered that he had given the blessed vial to Kabuto already.

He was getting jumpy. Paranoid. What was this? Was it merely because the end of his project was finally in sight? Was he actually afraid that something would go wrong?

Maybe it was the fault of that bitch, the Uzumaki. Maybe she was making him feel like this. Before, he had rather liked the dramatic irony of having her teach her son, with neither one the wiser of what was being done to the other. But he hadn't seen her in person in months, and her presence was starting to make him uneasy. She was too much of a wrench to be allowed near the delicate machinations of his plan-in-motion. She needed to be put out of the picture, and fast.

But how?

Orochimaru drummed his fingers lightly on the edge of his desk. He had kept her around because she was a good fighter, although that really hadn't done him any good in the end, and because she was the boy's mother. She was being kept deliberately ignorant and powerless, and while Orochimaru often liked the effect this had on his prisoners, he found himself wanting her to _know_ what he was doing. To feel how helpless she was because there was_ nothing she could do_.

Finally he stood up, pocketing a vial he had been saving. That would mean leaving an ability less impressive for last, but the order didn't really matter, as long as the ends justified the journey.

He swept out of the room, soon finding Kabuto bent over the boy's unconscious and restrained figure.

"Kabuto," he said, privately smirking, when a certain stiffening of Kabuto's shoulders betrayed his surprise.

The silver-haired boy's voice betrayed no emotion, as he said "Orochimaru-sama?" declining to turn and face him.

Orochimaru drew up even with him. "Finished?" he asked.

In response, Kabuto peeled back one of the boy's eyelids. Orochimaru couldn't help the breath that caught in his throat at the sight of his own Rinnegan. Well, it was almost his. As good as his.

"No trouble?"

"None, Orochimaru-sama."

"Excellent." Orochimaru clapped Kabuto on the back. "Now give him this." He handed Kabuto the vial he had slipped off of his desk. Kabuto was definitely caught off guard by that one, speechless as he examined the vial in his hand.

_Still got it,_ Orochimaru thought, inwardly smirking again. He had just turned to go when Kabuto finally spoke.

"_Now,_ Orochimaru-sama?" He sounded stricken. Orochimaru rolled his eyes. Downright _scandalized, _in fact.

"Yes, now."

"But, Naruto's vitals only stabilized a few minutes ago! I mean, true, this particular transfusion did seem to take rather more quickly than the others, and with less hassle, but I would still advise waiting a few days, if not a few _weeks_-"

"Kabuto." Orochimaru opened the door to the hallway. "Do it _now_."

Kabuto gulped. This was _not_ what he had signed up for. Once the deed was done, he sat unhappily, playing with the goggles he had given Naruto. Although he by no means considered himself a seal master- even Naruto was better than he was, but Kabuto could blame that on Naruto's genetics- Kabuto didn't even _know_ his own genetics-

Kabuto looked down at the goggles, running his finger along the leather strap. Little did Naruto know, but these goggles actually did serve a purpose. Along the inside of the lens rims and on the underside of the strap, concealed beneath a carefully stitched piece of leather, was a very particular set of seals. They would draw chakra from Naruto directly in order to cast a sort of misdirection array.

So long as Naruto followed Kabuto's advice and wore the goggles constantly, particularly if he wore them covering his eyes or on his forehead, anyone looking at Naruto would not focus on his eyes. That would ensure that, should Naruto look in a mirror, or should Kushina look at Naruto, it would not register that Naruto's eyes were any color other than their normal blue. They would see only what they expected to see.

The nice thing was that the effect could not be dispelled, as a genjutsu could be. It could also not be bypassed in any way that he knew of, short of removing the goggles.

Kabuto gently set them down on the edge of the operating table beside Naruto. He was distracting himself.

Giving Naruto two injections in a row, in a _day_, did not sit well with him. It couldn't be clearer that Orochimaru was getting impatient. And when he finally did melt down, Kabuto was not going to be caught in the blast radius.

Contrary to Kushina's beliefs, and Orochimaru-sama's, too, come to that, Kabuto did indeed have an escape plan. Several, actually.

Kushina's cell door opened with a creak and in came Orochimaru gliding against the stone floor.

Little did the snake know he stepped onto Kushina's sealing tag that writes another sealing array designed for a single purpose to imbued itself onto a person's chakra.

Orochimaru was cautious it was how he had evaded akatsuki for so long as he had stepped into the room an ominous feeling washed over him he looked down and saw an eccentric sealing array.

"what's this" orochimaru asked scared

"AHAH that seal essentially makes you into a "puppert" of sorts not the type that you control on strings, but the kind you can make them do, or at least in this case experience certain things with an application of your chakra you will experience anything I experience from injuries to pain if you don't give me the antidote for the scatter poison then you will die with me and even if you do swap bodies it won't help as the seal is tuned to your chakra will just be tuned to your host. I can also kill you with a hand sign if you try to possess my body my chakra signature ceases to be and so does yours killing you if you happen to override that little feature naruto is the backup key holder if you harm me or naruto I kill you if I don't see naruto a day I kill you if I suspect you have harmed or killed them I kill you is there an part you don't understand"?

"You're bluffing" he disparately hoped she was bluffing

"allow me to enlighten you"


	9. Chapter 8

Orochimaru was angry no he was furious that bitch kushina had just outsmarted him. He was formulating loads of ideas to get the dam seal of himself but knew it was virtually impossible as he had to remove his chakra and that was the one thing he didn't want to part from.

Naruto had not intended to sleep. He wanted to stay up, to pace, to scream or sit quietly and plan. But clearly he had been too drained to pursue any of these things, for here he was, in what couldn't possibly be anything but a dream.

Cold water swirled around his sandaled feet, drenching the cuffs of his pants so they clung to him, gritty and uncomfortable. He looked down and couldn't even see his own feet through the murky water. Clearly this was not his destination, a place where he was expected to stay. He had to move on. He turned his face this way and that, determining which direction to move in. Finally, he decided that if this was a dream, his destination would be wherever he went, regardless of which direction he actually walked in.

So he splashed forward, into the dimness of the tunnel.

It was quite some time later, a time he would only remember later on as a confused impression of freezing toes, difficult movement, and grungy tile walls, that he arrived in a sort of huge boiler room. Naruto had never seen a boiler room in his life, but this was clearly what the huge chamber was. The floor was warm and dry and there was a faint radiance of warmth from the other side of the cathedral-sized room.

Oh, cathedral-sized? Only in breadth. In height it was more like two or three cathedrals stacked. Huge brass bars or columns stretched from the floor on one side of the room and stretched upward, disappearing near the ceiling above. On Naruto's side of the bars, there was a large, bulky-looking object, taller by far than Naruto, covered by a white sheet and left, almost forgotten-looking by the wall.

Naruto heard whispers as he surveyed the chamber, turning to see a group of people huddled as far as they could get from the bars of brass. At least, they looked like people. They were long and whitish, tortured and somehow bound, suppressed, although there were no signs of physical confinement. They were staring at him in horror and whispering to each other, high and hissing and somehow on a level of communication he couldn't understand. He turned away, slightly sick, and caught the eyes of whatever was behind the bars, instead.

No, not behind the bars. In the _cage._ The eyes were enormous, orange-red and brilliant, and in the gloom that pervaded the cage, Naruto could pick out the warmly glowing contours of what had to be the largest fox he had ever seen. Nine fury tails, each as thick as the roots of a single tree in the Forest of Death, lay lazily on the stone-flagged floor, or else waved slowly, in the dark, dusty air.

"Hello, Uzumaki. I've been trying to reach you for some time. Please, sit down." The voice was neither as deep, nor as loud as Naruto had been expecting. He had watched the great fox's mouth move as it spoke, but he got the impression that if this had not been a dream, he would not have understood that sounds it was making.

He sat, well, sprawled, really, on the floor. "Are you the Kyuubi?" he asked conversationally. It just seemed to be true. He knew it the way one knows things in dreams, instinctually and without question.

"Yes, I am. What are you here to ask me?"

Naruto blinked. That was a strange sensation, like this was real instead of a dream. How was he going to get home from wherever this was… "Didn't you summon me here?"

"You are my host, we can speak at any time now that you know of the possibility. I want to answer your questions. And get to know you." He looked Naruto over critically. "You don't look much like my last host, although I guest I'm not one to talk. Not like I resemble any of my family."

"Who was your last host?" Naruto asked, curiously.

"Why, your mother. Kushina."

If Naruto had not been sitting, his knees would have buckled. "So she really is my-"

"I'm afraid so."

"But she didn't-"

"Tell you about me? Probably she was under instruction not to. But like she said, she never wanted this life for you, didn't want you to go through what she did. You and I share a day of celebration, of mob demonstrations and violence and drinking. She didn't have to go through that, exactly, but she was pushed around pretty badly until she moved to Konoha. She didn't want that for you."

Naruto lowered his head, felt tears stinging his eyes.

I'm a monster. I deserve whatever the villagers do to me after I get home."

"Hey, now," Kyuubi said sharply. "Don't ever say that. Having power, and using it to defend yourself and your loved ones makes you strong. Makes you better than the snake Sannin."

"Who's that?"

"The one who's been financing and facilitating these genetic experiments on you."

"_What_genetic experiments?" Naruto was floored, appalled. Is this where the gaps in his memory had come from?

"Ah," the Kyuubi looked sorry, as much as a giant glowing fox could portray emotion as human as sorrow. "I thought you knew."

"I'm going to kill him." It was a promise, a statement of resolution.

"If you want my assistance, I'm offering," The Kyuubi said, seriously.

Naruto nodded, blindly. "How long has this been going on?" He gritted out.

"Since you were ten and first arrived in this place." The Kyuubi answered.

"And why?"

"That I can only guess at. However, I can give you one lead. When you first arrived, he sent in nine skilled genjutsu experts to try and reason with me or take me from your body." The Kyuubi nodded at the shapes of people huddled in the corner, still whispering. "Eight minds have sat trapped there for well over a year. One I sent back as a warning. He lived just long enough to tell the snake that I would rather kill you than allow him to take me from you. The messenger, I'm sure, died of Youki poisoning shortly thereafter."

"Youki?"

"My own brand of chakra. I am composed of it, I control it, and it can be highly dangerous to humans. Including you. As my host, your seal should negate the effects, but something is a bit wrong with yours. I suggest you work on that at your earliest convenience."

"What seal, where is it?"

"On the bars of my cage you will see part of it. The other part appears when you channel chakra, as black lines against your skin."

Naruto shook his head, trying to understand, to take in everything. He got the distinct feeling his was being given information in the wrong order, with lots of important things missing, but he kept being distracted from this as the Kyuubi kept offering new, incomplete pieces of information.

"Why should I trust you?" Naruto asked.

"Because if you die, I die, and wherever you are, I must be. Your interest is my own self-interest. And anyway, despite what the snake has done to your body, he did your mind a world of good, and I actually quite like you." The Kyuubi paused, thinking. "And that Kabuto boy, too," He said finally.

"Kabuto?" Naruto said, half surprised, half scornful.

"Yes. He has depth, and a sense of decency that he hadn't had to exercise until you came along. I think he's rooting for you, secretly, and that could make all of the difference when we escape."

"And how will we do that?"

"I can help you. I, being on the inside, have been keeping tabs on what has been done to you. I know what you will be able to do when the slightest opportunity arises to escape. I will signal you, and until then, we will keep in contact."

"Is it time for me to leave?" Naruto asked, noticing the shift in the Kyuubi's tone of voice.

"I believe so. You have questions, I know, but you must think first about what you have learned. Come to some conclusions. And wait for my signal."

Naruto nodded, and rose to leave. As he turned, he caught sight of the huge object under the sheet. "What is that?" He asked, poised to leave the chamber.

The Kyuubi gave a great sigh. "I do not know what it will become, only that it is a product of what the snake Sanin has done to you. When it fully forms, I assume you will have to face it."

"I see," Naruto said. He stepped out of the chamber, down into the water, but the water was missing, and so was the floor, he was falling, falling, and landed with a jolt and a bounce of bedsprings, his heart pounding and his hands shaking.

For the next few weeks, Naruto was planning. Planning how to escape, planning how to exploit Kabuto, planning what he would say to Sarutobi when he returned-

But most importantly, he was planning his new puppet. He measured and sketched, chose and rejected materials and ideas, begged input and reference books from Kabuto.

Kabuto was there, a strange constant. He seemed more on edge than ever before, but Naruto took no notice, or seemed to.

After a week or two or preserving and cleaning, he was ready to begin real work on his masterpiece. His first thought was this: wooden or metal frame. Wood could be splintered or rotten and required constant upkeep. But it was lighter than metal and did not conduct heat. Metal was more durable, and rusting wouldn't be an issue if he used the right type, or even the right jutsu. But it was fairly heavy. Naruto gritted his teeth. He would become strong enough that the metal puppet was no trouble at all.

Next he turned to structural shape, allowing room for weapons, for seals, for compartments and for changes to be made later. He worked for hours at a time, stopping to stretch or train. He couldn't let his skills atrophy if he was planning to escape soon.

Some nights he spoke to the Kyuubi, either as a voice in his head, or in his dreams, in the great chamber. He asked question after question, and the Kyuubi patiently answered each one, but still Naruto couldn't shake the feeling that he could not be trusted. The Kyuubi seemed to know how he felt, giving curt answers and lashing his tails. Naruto could tell he was frustrated by the lack of trust, feeling he had done nothing to deserve Naruto's suspicion. They hadn't discussed that yet, not really, but Naruto could see that conversation just waiting to happen, brewing like a storm on the horizon.

"Tell me, Kabuto, how is the boy's little project coming along?"

Kabuto pushed up his glasses calmly. He knew for a fact that Naruto had finished the puppet just yesterday, or, as Naruto had put it, completed this first edit of it. Kabuto had requested that Naruto seal it in a scroll and then let Naruto observe him lock it in a cabinet in the operation room. Naruto was very protective of this, his best work. And it was, although Kabuto wouldn't admit it to Orochimaru, a true masterpiece. Elegantly designed, and deadly efficient. "It is nearly finished, Orochimaru-sama," Kabuto said smoothly, covering the lie with ease.

"Excellent. As you know, we have a little over two months left, and I'm eager to hurry things along. Now, will you give Naruto the final infusion?"

"Yes, Orochimaru-sama. But what of the Kyuubi? Need I remind you of the experts you sent in over a year ago?"

"No, you need not," Orochimaru said sharply. "That will be dealt with after you give the boy Zetsu's DNA. See to it, Kabuto." _Was Orochimaru being foolish to trust this operation to someone who he suspected of disloyalty? But Kabuto had never double-crossed him before, had he?_Orochimaru resolved to observe this operation personally. "I will be monitoring this last infusion from the adjoining observation room."

"Very good, Orochimaru-sama." Kabuto left, smirking. So if Naruto _happened _to escape, Orochimaru would be watching and Kabuto would ensure that he could not be held responsible. On the other hand, it would be damn-near impossible for Naruto to escape at all without help, and even if he did, it would be wise for Kabuto to make himself scarce. It's not like he had nowhere to go.

"Naruto, I have one final vitamin sample for you," Kabuto said, sticking his head around the edge of the door."

_One more genetic experiment, you mean, you freak,_ Naruto thought viciously. _Kyuubi?_

_Go with him. If he is giving you power you would be a fool not to accept, and, anyway, it would be suspicious. _Naruto swung his legs off his bed and followed Kabuto, trying not to clench his fists.

_Is it almost time for me to get out of this place?_

_I believe so. Let's just see where he takes us._

To Naruto's surprise, Kabuto led him to the same operation room where he had been working on his puppet. He knew the scroll it was sealed in was stored in one of these cabinets because he had seen Kabuto lock it up.

_Alright, here's the plan, _the Kyuubi said hurriedly,_ he's about to sedate you so listen closely…._

Kabuto handed Naruto the glass of his usual knockout mixture. As Naruto took it, he seemed to be concentrating on something very intently. It gave Kabuto simultaneously hope that the boy had some plan and a dread of what part of his own physical safety was accounted for in this plan. As soon as Naruto was out cold, Kabuto strapped him down, working quickly to give an appearance of competency and efficiency, and carefully not looking at the darkened two-way mirror set into the wall.

He administered the shot without incident and then sat down with his usual folder of shorthand notes to wait. A few minutes later he heard a sound. Confused, he looked up to see Naruto's bright blue eyes peering into his intently. Before he could so much as speak, Naruto had melted down through the table. Almost instantly a shadow fell across Kabuto and he received a punishing blow to the head, knocking him out cold. He didn't even struggle before succumbing to unconsciousness.

Naruto turned around, ripped off the door to the cabinet where his scroll lay, knowing he had only moments. As he turned back, scroll in hand, He spotted Kabuto's folder of shorthand notes. Ignoring the Kyuubi's yells to _Get out! Get out now!_ Naruto scooped up the folder just as the door banged open.

Out of know where a snake constructed of other white snakes devoured naruto

Naruto was bound to snakes to the side were three other people and in front of him was a snake like man.

Naruto was thrashing and wriggling trying to break free from his restraints but they just wouldn't budge.

"Kukuku naruto your body will be mine" orochimaru said licking his lips with his long tongue

Naruto's hair grow out he was enveloped in a shroud of red chakra the dissolved the snakes holding naruto he had more of a feral appearance his nails grow out and he was on all fours.

**ARGHHH**


	10. Chapter 9

When Kabuto awoke the first think he saw was Orochimaru's original body composed of other snakes in the centre of the body was Naruto eyes closed and standing.

"Which one are you?"Kabuto asked fearing the answer.

"Which one do you think"naruto said.

Naruto was bombarded with memories, skills,jutsu,experience. He know new how to properly utilise his genetic ability's and he was itching to use the edo tensei but first he decided to have a chat with Kabuto."Orochimaru is dead killed by his own greed I know about the genetic experiments and the siege that is being planned on Konoha during the chunin exams I also what the moukten and the shoton kekkai genkai"

"Hm what do you plan to do with all this information"

"The siege will continue and I will go back to Konoha and tell Kushina what has happened here I will leave after I have received the "vitamins"

Kabuto walked into Kushina's cell "Orochimaru is dead"

"I know I used a high powered seal to bind his chakra and subdue it has Naruto already left for Konoha"

" no he said that he would be travelling to the old island of the Uzumaki somewhere in the land of water he also said that he wants you to become the leader of oto under the disguise of Orochimaru he doesn't want anyone knowing your alive we have already manipulated suna and iwa would gladly see the destruction of Konoha"

"why didn't he just make you the oto kage you were Orochimaru's right hand man and you know how the country runs"

"He told me to tell you that your dream came true being the first female kage"

A lone tear cascaded down kushina's cheek she muttered a silent thank you

Naruto stood on the desolated island he had sensed 10 jounin level chakras and 1 kage to test out my knew slowly sunk into the ground.

"Danzo-sama we found what you were looking for the mask that release all that have been eaten by the shingami and all the scrolls this island possess we also found this girl our sensor say she has a special chakra like uzumaki Kushina but we cannot access the scrolls it has a blood seal on them"

"Use the girl she must be a uzumaki I am certain of it they all seem to possess red hair and unique chakra"

**Bansho tenin **(Heavenly attraction of all of creation) the root member the girl with red hair and the scroll all flashed through the air Naruto took out a chakra rod and penetrated the man's heart he then placed his hand on the man's head and absorbed all information,skills and jutsu.

**Katon: goukakyuu no jutsu** (fire release: grand fire ball

**Futon:daitoppa **(wind style: giant break through)

An impressive amount of fire was exceled from one of the root members only to be reinforced by the wind chakra however Naruto wasn't even fazed he put both of his arms up and said. **Fujutsu kyuin**(blocking technique absorption seal) the effects were instantaneous the fire ball was gone leaving nothing behind but small embers.

Interesting who ever this boy is if I can subdue him and control him he can became a very valuable stopped to look at the boys eyes that ripple pattern and the tomoe underneath the rennigan he only once saw them in ame and the amount of power they possessed was not to be taken lightly and that's not all the sharingan this is just too much of an opportunity to pass off he looked at the boys hair and whiskers so the nine-tails brat is alive.

Danzo ripped of his arm bindings revealing 10 moving sharingan eyes he made 3 hand signs and channelling wind chakra to his mouth.

**Fūton: Renkūdan**(wind: style Air bullet) a massive amount of wind chakra travelled at breakneck speed hoping to rip him to shreds.

**Shinra Tensei **(Heavenly subjugation of the omnipresent god) Danzo's body was thrown away, the pressure crushing his ribs and spine, causing him to cough up copious amounts of blood. Danzo didn't even hit the ground when his body disappeared and a Sharingan on his arm closed. Danzo reappeared a few feet away unharmed but the annoyed look on his face caused Naruto to smirk.

"Based on the eye closing that technique can only be used by the sharingan you have 9 eyes on your arm and 1 eye in your left eye socket this concludes you have 10 minutes of the technique remaining active so all I have to do is press you to waste them"

"He figured out izanagi I have to escape I don't stand a chance against the rennigan and sharingan best option is to use _Fuu and Torune"_

"It would appear that you seem to be running low on those precious eyes of yours." Naruto taunted lightly. Despite his voice staying in a monotone it was no less painful for the old war hawk to accept.

He also spoke the truth; Danzo's feeble attempts to flee had been completely and torune didn't even hinder Naruto they lay at his feet their souls removed.

'_I can't expect to be able to escape anymore, not only that it seems like Fuu and Torune where useless Looks like I have no choice but to fight to the death, one of us will walk away. But time is on his side, once the time for izanagi runs out one effective strike and I will lose._' Danzo realised, and for the first time took up a more offensive stance.

Drawing a Katana Danzo sped towards Naruto ready to cleave the Rinnegan wielder in two. Naruto had other plans however and parried the blow by using Asura path to turn his arm from the elbow to fingers into a blade, the angle caused sparks to fly in every direction. Not deterred by Naruto's effortless defence Danzo brought his blade back for a second swing. This time he forced the Uzumaki to move, jumping back to avoid having his neck sliced open.

It was then Naruto who pushed the fight forward, his arm like a blade he stabbed at Danzo as if going for a knockout blow. This forced Danzo back pivoting on his supporting leg while swatting the blade away. Naruto had expected this however, despite the fact that he was not trained to use a sword. While Danzo was off balance a second saw like blade extended from Naruto's back, and bent around. Off balance Danzo could not avoid the strike and was once more forced to use Izanagi.

This time instead of reforming a safe distance away, Danzo reappeared directly behind Naruto, Katana already pointing at his back. With no chance of dodging the tip of the Root commanders blade left a deep cut across his back before he was blown away with a Shinra Tensei. Unlike other times when he had used the technique to crush bones, Naruto had no chance to strengthen the power of his blast so Danzo landed completely unharmed. "So you do have some bite after all. I had come to the conclusion that you were a weak man that hid behind his far more talented men as a sign of power. Then again how many times have I killed you now? From the looks of it you have three lives left, how long can you make them last?" The Uzumaki said ignoring the dull ache of pain, as well as the blood spreading across his back.

Danzo scoffed while two spinning disks of compressed air began to form in the palms of his hands. Without warning Danzo tossed the large wind shuriken in his right hand, moving in an arc behind Naruto in an instant the released the second jutsu at Naruto's, kicking off once more to draw his Katana and charge from the side.

'_Clever, he timed these attacks perfectly to prevent me from absorbing the jutsu or repelling them._' naruto realised. Still it was not enough to outsmart the Uzumaki, from the opposite side Naruto extended a hand and with a few simple words pulled his body out of harm's way just before the first of the wind shuriken would strike their target.

The ground underneath Danzo's feet exploded and a large saw like blade ripped up the ground before cutting the war hawk in half in a vertical arc that ran straight through the middle of his body. Blood sprayed in every direction but as always Danzo changed his own reality in order to preserve his life.

Danzo was standing with both arms outstretched as a massive burst of wind blew all around him, trees were ripped out of the ground yet Naruto stood his ground with ease, "_He must be getting desperate, to use a move like that wasting so much chakra is pointless"_

Danzo now only had one eye remaining in his arm and it was closing before their very eyes, leaving the Root leader with only the Mangekyo Sharingan implanted in his left eye. His over the top use of his chakra was an attempt to create a fair distance between himself and the Uzumaki who was clearly in control at this point. Danzo had spent so long hiding away in his underground lair, avoiding all the fights that had come Konoha's way that he was no longer the skilled shinobi that had been a rival to Hiruzen Sarutobi, no his skill now was not that far advanced of a standard Jounin. He had confidence in his Fuuton jutsu, but when your opponent could absorb all chakra that did not count for much.

"I would ask you to give up, but you don't believe in that do you" Naruto said darkly while forming a hand seal. The next moment four thick walls rose up to box Naruto and Danzo in a close area.

It didn't take a tactical genius to guess that Naruto had made the walls heavily reinforced, at least enough to withstand a barrage from his Fuuton jutsu's. 'This must be to stop me from escaping; I wonder what he has planned?' The root commander thought desperately, his few remaining lives feeling shorter with each passing second.

In the blink of an eye Naruto ran through a number of hand seals and summoned a giant chameleon that instantly camouflaged itself with the stone behind it. "This ends now!" Naruto yelled surprisingly out of character while the invisible summons beneath his feet spewed forth a jet of flames. Naruto added to those flames with a large gust of wind that caused the Katon jutsu to expand and the heat to become almost unbearable, even for Naruto.

Danzo attempted to use a Suiton jutsu to protect himself, but it was no use, the heat from the flames turned all water instantly to steam, the old war hawk was engulfed by the flames yet stubbornly refused to let out so much as a whimper while his flesh burned.

The walls came down and there was no sign of Danzo, not that Naruto had expected there to be, he still had one more Sharingan after all, the one implanted in his eye. Naruto had assumed that Danzo was hiding hoping that he did not know about his final Sharingan, so he was hiding, waiting for Naruto to leave giving him freedom to escape. "I know you're out there, suppress your chakra all you want, it won't fool me. You have no more lives to lose and no closer to defeating me than you were at the start of this pointless fight." Naruto called out.

Danzo knew his time was up, he was starting to feel the drain of fighting constantly with multiple Sharingan, and the drain was immense, even with Hashirama Senju's cells making up his arm. Now that it was useless and his adrenalin began to fade from hiding the wear on his body was coming to light. Naruto had said he was suppressing his chakra, but that was only a half truth. He no longer had any chakra left to fight with; he used a good portion of it up using Izanagi that last time with Shisui's Sharingan, the eye that had let him gain so much influence over the politicians of Konoha in the past twelve years.

'_I may not be able to win, but perhaps I could at least take that bastard out with me. I still have my last resort._' Danzo mused slowly taking a few steps out from his hiding place at the edge of the clearing.

'_Just a few more feet and I will be within range to capture him within my seal._' Danzo eventually stopped an arm's reach from Naruto and looked expressionlessly into his eyes. "Well what are you waiting for?

"I'll make it as quick as possible."

They moved at the same time, Danzo ripped his shirt open while the chakra rod pierced his heart, but rather than blood a large seal began forming on his body. Naruto paused for a moment marvelling at the development. However he soon realised that his body would not move and the seal had begun spreading over his skin.

Danzo's arm had started to become unstable and the Shodai Hokage's cells began taking control, his arm started to grow leaves and expand out into a massive tree while the seal spread still further outwards.

Acting quickly Naruto began absorbing the chakra from the seal covering his body and with Deva path's help was able to escape just as the seal had finished. A fifteen foot area surrounding Danzo's body in each direction exploded before being sucked in leaving a large crater and Danzo laying at the bottom perfectly still.

Naruto slowly walked over to Danzo and placed his hand on his head.

**Flashback:**

_Danzo was scared beside him was Kagami uchiha,Torifu akimichi as well as his rival Hiruzan and his team mates __Koharu utatne and Homura mitokado_ _their squad leader the second hokage were being pursued by kumogakuru`s kinkaku squad the only way to escape was for one of them to be a decoy meaning certain death he wanted to die for his companions just as his grandfather and father had but was paralysed with fear "I will do it" he was shocked before he could compose himself his rival always beat him just as he had beaten him in asking biwko out."lord hokage I will do it".But it fell on deaf ears the hokage put his hand up to silence him "no I will go but before I do I hereby appoint you __Hiruzan sarutobi as the third hokage._

**Flashback end:**

He turned around to gaze at the young girl he had saved then at the scroll he shrugged his shoulders took the scroll and sunk into the ground. 


End file.
